How many cancers would you wager could be linked to emissions from a coal plant of comparable energy output? What if there was a tsunami and it blew up?
What if we took the average number of fatalities per gigawatt-hour generated for coal and compared that to the worst-case ever scenario for nuclear, Chernobyl? Does anyone have these figures? I think we could all really use them to put this whole thing in proper perspective.
Coal mining killed more than 6,000 people in China in 2004 (a typical year). Early deaths due to air pollution from coal combustion are measured in the tens of thousands per year in the United States.
http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMe0809178
Chernobyl was the worst possible nuclear accident. It caused between 50 and 5000 early deaths. As a major industrial accident, it was only average. It pales in comparison to the 1984 Bhopal disaster
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bhopal_disaster
It took a long time to convince myself of this, but it really is quite obvious: because of the energy density difference of ~ 1,000,000 between fission and everything else, just about everything you'd care to measure about fission is going to be at least an order of magnitude better. That's because the amount of energy we're interested in is roughly constant, so the upper bound on destruction is roughly the same, but the material flows for fission are a million times smaller.
Actually, appropriate use of fission should increase the demand for energy somewhat, and this would be a very good thing.
I'm right there with you on this. I live in Tokyo and I still hope they build more reactors in Japan after this (no more GE Mark 1s though, please). There is no question that nuclear power is cleaner and safer than any fossil fuel-derived power-generation technology.
