The negative outcome for someone outside the nuclear industry has a name: cancer. The negative outcome for someone outside the coal industry (respiratory illness) is less well-defined, less likely to be attributed to coal, and less likely to cause someone to die unusually young. That last is important - old people and people with asthma die from air pollution. Otherwise healthy people can contract radiation-induced cancer.
The mechanism by which nuclear plants produce negative outcomes (radiation) is also poorly understood and imperceptible, whereas one can see smog and kinda tell when it's a code red day out.
It's not just that there's some destruction - it's that the destruction can't be understood, perceived, or planned for until it's too late.
People's fear of nuclear power is irrational, but it doesn't necessarily depend entirely on propaganda.
You can say exactly the same set of things about smog, the soot that blackens a grilled hamburger, the hamburger itself, and the breakdown products of the oil that fries the french fries that go with the burger.
They are not only carcinogens, but carcinogens that (from what I can tell) are almost by definition worse than 100msv radiological exposures, in that radiological exposure is one of the purer sources of carcinogenesis we can measure, and 100msv is the floor of our ability to measure it.
Compare that to eating four or more serving of red meat in a week (hardly a crazy amount in the US or Argentina); that corresponds to a lifetime cancer risk comparable to having been a former longtime active smoker. Smoking will reliably give you cancer. 100msv of radiation will give one out of some huge number of people like you cancer. Probably.
I'm having a hard time digging up the figures, but last time I looked, only about 5% of smokers die from lung cancer, and much smaller numbers from a few other smoking-related cancers. Another chunk get cancer but don't die from it. Unless I'm badly misremembering, though, the majority of smokers — more than 50% — never get cancer from smoking.
I don't think that a mechanism that fails more than half the time, or even, say, 1% of the time, should be considered reliable.
I concur that people should worry more about smoking, red meat, and browned oils than about 100mSv exposures to radioactivity. Outside the US, I would add automotive exhaust and indoor wood fires as major causes of cancer.
It puts a lot of stress on the heart, too, and I think a fair number of them die with smoking as a contributing cause to that.
Anyhow, if you do get cancer from smoking, it's pretty ugly. My grandfather had it, in spite of quitting immediately once it was generally known that smoking was a Bad Thing (TM). He had to use Prednisone and it weakened his bones until they started breaking all the time. He was very upset with Grandma for calling the paramedics once, too, because he was just ready to die :( It made for a really miserable way to spend his last ten+ years of life.
The negative outcome for someone outside the nuclear industry has a name: cancer. The negative outcome for someone outside the coal industry (respiratory illness) is less well-defined, less likely to be attributed to coal, and less likely to cause someone to die unusually young. That last is important - old people and people with asthma die from air pollution. Otherwise healthy people can contract radiation-induced cancer.
The mechanism by which nuclear plants produce negative outcomes (radiation) is also poorly understood and imperceptible, whereas one can see smog and kinda tell when it's a code red day out.
It's not just that there's some destruction - it's that the destruction can't be understood, perceived, or planned for until it's too late.
People's fear of nuclear power is irrational, but it doesn't necessarily depend entirely on propaganda.