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by Wientje 5577 days ago
This may actually be true. Uranium decays into radioactive radon sooner or later. Radon is a gas so it escapes the earth. People breathe the stuff and inside the lungs it decays into polonium-210 sooner or later. By mining the uranium and sticking it into a reactor, the radon is removed from the atmosphere. Wether or not this benefit outweighs the deaths from Chernobyl and others is a very good (and still open) question.

By looking at the statistics however, switching all coal plants to nuclear reactor would save lives (mostly miners)