Amazing when you compare with just coal mining deaths and premature death estimate from coal fired electricity generation over the years. It boggles the mind how the fossil fuel / environmentalist lobby anti-nuclear fear propaganda ever took hold in total absence of fact, but I have to hand it to them.
That single coal power station explosion I found on the first page of search killed more people than the Chernobyl explosion.
You joke, but the real key is to buy governments, advertising, and "activists".
Long term radiation from Chernobyl may kill anywhere from 100 to thousands of premature deaths, but I also don't count the continual nuclear and chemical disaster that is a normally operating coal power plant or its contribution to premature deaths, let alone its contribution to climate change. Only the deaths as a direct result of the explosion, just to go a little easier on coal.
If we want to compare the total scale of each disaster from start to finish, in terms of premature deaths then the coal disaster begins the day the boilers were fired up.
https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/c-change/news/fossil-fuel-air-p...
i mean, isn't that like exactly how it is always done?
The broad public was introduced to the atomic age by wiping out tens of thousands and humankind had to live for decades under the prospect of a sudden nuclear holocaust with no way to do anything about it. I would not be so quick to blame people alone for rejecting this „atomic age“. In my opinion the history of „nuclear“ is one PR/image fuckup after the other. This is absolutely a problem of its own making.
I‘m physicist, I think that nuclear would be a nice addition in our carbon-free energy toolbox but I also understand why the public opinion is what it is - especially in Germany which was designated playground of nuclear superpowers during the Cold War.
From https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S221462962...
Opinion polls in the 1950s and 1960s showed remarkably high approval of nuclear power [25], [38], [39], [40]. Attitudes regarding construction near a poll respondent’s residence were also positive, with multiple surveys showing majority or plurality approval [15].
I mostly blame the fossil fuel lobby and the anti nuclear "environmentalist" movement.