Estimates of excess deaths due to nuclear, counting chernobyl, are the lowest of any energy technology. This isn't even counting the part where no new nuclear reactor could possibly be as unsafe as Chernobyl or Fukushima in the same way that no modern car could be as unsafe as as a car from the 1960s: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fPF4fBGNK0U
My grandfather's dad died in the coal mines. They dropped his body off on the sidewalk infron of the house. His mother married two more times and the other husbands also died in the mine. My grandfather then worked from age 7 to 21 in the mines. He died at 88 from Black Lung induced Lung Cancer.
A dangerous plant design like Chernobyl would have been illegal to build in any western country, so not sure why you think it is relevant to any other country. Accidents from hydroelectric plants have killed orders of magnitude more people than even the largest estimates of deaths from Fukushima (or even Chernobyl) - are you also opposed to hydroelectric power?
Um. This isn't something where you can just run your reactor in different configurations at test time and run time. The technology has come a long way since the 1960s and the math and science have advanced transformatively. Building an unsafely non-compliant nuclear plant would be like building a diesel car and then trying to tell the regulators that it's electric. You can do some fudging, sure, but things like the sign of the void coefficient are effectively impossible to lie about.
>Um. This isn't something where you can just run your reactor in different configurations at test time and run time.
No, but lying and having experts being, ahem flexible, about the expected safety is very easy, and par for the course when selling multi-billion dollar projects...
It's also very easy to ignore "black swan" event cases, and the potential impact to millions of lives, just because you think you've covered everything there is to cover.
And it is different. Cars still crash, but for any given crash speed ťhe survivability of any given class of car is two orders or magnitude better than its 1950s counterpart.
The recipe for the catastrophe is design + time, so it's not like "new designs have fewer failures" offers much comfort. Of course they would.
Plus, previous installations had fewer potential non-design-related issues, such as terrorism, which (in today's nihilistic "more possible damage, including innocents and even myself" way) wasn't as much a thing in the 60s and 70s.
At least damns damage only the area relatively near them. The implications of a nuclear catastrophe can impact thousands of miles around, including major cities.