What do you mean by "safer"? Less accidents compared to eg coal plants?
No exploding coal plant will render a whole region unlivable for >30 years. Both happened at Tschernobyl and Fukushima.
No exploding coal plant will render a whole region unlivable for >30 years. Both happened at Tschernobyl and Fukushima.
According to this [1], for every death caused by nuclear power, 350 people die because of coal power.
Note that most of these people died as a consequence of Chernobyl accident (~4000 vs ~500), so by current standards Nuclear Power is probably even safer.
The issue with nuclear is that deaths are concentrated in a few "big" accidents, that have much more visibility and leave a lasting impressions, thus scaring the population much more. (This is not unique to nuclear power though, something similar happens with plane vs car travel: the latter causes generally more deaths, but plan accidents are more newsworthy).
[1] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/death-rates-from-energy-p...
That’s pretty nasty, I’d rather be close to a nuclear power plant.
Unlivable for humans. The exclusion zone around Chernobyl became a de facto wild-life sanctuary. To the extent that some environmentalists now argue benefits of officially maintaining it as one indefinitely. Human supporting activities such as farming, mining and habitat expansion often come at a serious cost to local ecosystems. Nature ends up flourishing over time in humans excluded regions exactly because they are unlivable for > 30 years.
As pointed out by others, one effect of burning coal is the concentration of its radioactive elements in fly ash. And since less care is taken, more radioactive material ends up released into the environment by coal plants than nuclear plants. It's worth pointing out however, when contrasted with background, risks from exposure to radioactivity is not significantly raised by living near coal plants. The real killer from coal is pollution. Having said that, accumulation of fly ash over time could be a concern, especially wherever it gathered under non-uniform dispersal. As far as I know, this is yet to be shown.
Perhaps a stronger example of society's inconsistent reasoning about radioactivity exposure is inhalation of tobacco smoke. It's curious that information on the significant amounts of radioactive material in tobacco smoke did not percolate widely and probably would not have changed habits anyway, given its known carcinogenic nature was already not enough to do so.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/death-rates-from-energy-p...