[gamble]

How exactly are you quantifying severity? The worst case for a reactor is vastly worse than anything that can happen at other types of plant. The financial bill for cleaning up nuclear accidents is already in the billions of dollars, not counting Fukushima.

[tptacek]

The financial bill for mitigating the damages being caused to the environment (not to mention foreign policy) by fossil fuels is dwarfing that of nuclear power.

A "severe" accident results in loss of life, or in square kilometers of land unexpectedly rendered unusable for habitation or agriculture.

[AJ007]

The worst case scenario for global warming involves a change in climate so devastating that the earth may be able to feed little more than 100 million humans and may take hundreds of thousands of years to return to the point we are at now. It makes the dangers posed by nuclear energy seem fairly trivial.

I have yet to read any worst case scenarios for nuclear energy accidents which are anywhere comparable to this.

[wtn]

Oh nice point. People don't think of all the various costs.

Lots of people die in mining accidents and mining byproducts cause water pollution.

NO2 emissions are horrid for human health—I don't have death count numbers at hand.

[zizee]

Is it much worse than the Banqiao Dam disaster where an estimated 90-230k people died? What would happen if there was a catastrophic failure of the Hoover dam?

This is not to say nuclear failure isn't bad news, just that many large scale electricty generating schemes have a big downside and it's going to be a big ask to find 100% benign alternatives.

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banqiao_Dam