What are you talking about? The timescale of nuclear power is comparable to most other forms of electricity generation. We have reliable, long term statistics which show it to be insanely safe compared to all other forms of generation, and that's despite the fact that all these reactors are shithouse designs from the stone ages. We know how to build reactors that are orders of magnitude more safe, which is remarkable since nuclear is already the safest form of electricity.
As for using risk as an excuse to avoid it—nuclear power is orders of magnitude safer than air travel, but you don't see anyone deciding that we should continue to travel by boat.
> As for using risk as an excuse to avoid it—nuclear power is orders of magnitude safer than air travel, but you don't see anyone deciding that we should continue to travel by boat.
if you look at failure rate, there are only 450 nuclear power plants currently in existence as of 2016. To save time, let's do some napkin math and estimation with charitable rounding. Let's say there are 1000 in existence. So far we have seen at least one critical failure. For the sake of rounding, let's charitably round that to 1 failure. Let's say that of those 1000 power plants, the average time of existence is 40 years. That means that we have about 40000 years of nuclear power plant testing so far. And we've had 1 failure in that, so if we use years, we have 1 in 40000 years.
Even adjusting to days, we get 1 in 14.6 million.
Looking at air travel, the crash rate is about 1 in 4 million.
Now consider the consequences of that one catastrophic failure compared to the cost of a plane crash on average. You can't be serious when you say those are the same.
Even with incredibly charitable looks at nuclear power safety stats it's nowhere near your uncited "orders of magnitude" safer.
I think you really don't get the risk formula here. It's not about failure percentage, it's about the consequences of any failure at all, no matter how rare. An increase in nuclear power only increases the chances of any failure.
As for using risk as an excuse to avoid it—nuclear power is orders of magnitude safer than air travel, but you don't see anyone deciding that we should continue to travel by boat.