[tptacek]

Didn't that same article suggest that what they were likely to end up with apart from an exposure to 180msv† was the equivalent of a bad sunburn?

It's not like we don't have any idea what radiation does, is it? It's among the better studied of the human industrial health hazards, right? A lot better understood than, say, endocrine disruptors?

Because coal kills 30-60 industry workers every year. (Down from ~1200/yr in the late '40s).

† (Which, while more carcinogenic than the air in Chicago, is far less carcinogenic than failing to eat enough leafy green vegetables or a 4-times-a-week habit of eating red meat)

[Tuna-Fish]

The industry worker casualties are flatly insignificant compared to the deaths caused by release of SO2 and NO2.

In the whole world, roughly a million people die every year due to the direct effects of coal power production. Most of that is because of the very dirty plants in use outside of the western world -- but even here, more than 50,000 people die every year because of coal.