But nuclear meltdowns would have killed a lot of people and made a lot of land uninhabitable.
Chernobyl, the worst recorded nuclear disaster, was directly responsible for 33 deaths and estimates on total attributable deaths due to health complications from radiation range from 4,000 to 60,000 [2].
In 2018, it is estimated that fossil fuel air pollution was responsible for over 8m deaths worldwide. [3]
Mortality rate by tWH isn't even close [4]. Fossil fuels are significantly more damaging both in terms of loss-of-life and habitability on this planet.
1 -https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_reactor_accidents_in_t... 2 - https://ourworldindata.org/what-was-the-death-toll-from-cher... 3 - https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/c-change/news/fossil-fuel-air-p... 4 - https://www.statista.com/statistics/494425/death-rate-worldw...
Around the former site extending 50 km (30 mi) (a bureaucratic rather than scientific determination) is an exclusion zone which must be maintained for 300+ years.
Duration for which the former core and reactor itself will remain lethally radioactive extends to tens of thousands of years.
Both intervals greatly exceed the span of virtually all human institutions, as well as modern languages, writing systems, let alone civilisation itself.
Our measures and senses of risk are very poorly suited to such timeframes. (A problem also in addressing fossil fuel hazards.)
https://www.newsweek.com/chernobyl-safe-now-when-will-141448...
That said, these aren't an issue with renewables.
If you live in Ghana, your perspective might be significantly different. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-05-29/the-rich-...
We don't have a plan for handling this solar waste in 25 years, which is estimated to be 78M metric tons in 2050. [1]
This doesn't need to be an either-or scenario, but we can't ignore the waste and environmental cost of solar in these discussions.
1 -https://www.wired.com/story/solar-panels-are-starting-to-die...
(All of which gets kinda exposed when there's opposition also to fusion, so many nay sayers, and it won't work this, and it takes 40 years that... also, I swear, if I'm going to see one more "fusion reactor in the sky" tweet from Elon, my head's gonna explode. Dirtbag manipulator.)
Quantities of radiation released by coal plants under normal operations are not a health concern. Coal has plenty of other health, and environmental, concerns.
Quanities of radiation released by a coal plant are unlikely to vary much at all, no matter how critically mismanaged the plant might be.
Quantities of radiation emitted by a badly-mismanaged, sabotaged, or attacked nuclear power plant, on the other hand, become a health concern for people across continents and beyond, as with Chernobyl and Fukushima.
(Note that "concern" need not mean "realised risk", but given that one of the characteristics of nuclear incidents to date has been inaccurate or misleading information on precisely the levels of risk presented, prudence and caution strongly recommends presuming a worst case until otherwise conclusively demonstrated.)