Because nuclear bad. If it was a coal plant accident that killed 15 it would not make headlines outside of the country, but a 0-casualty nuclear accident makes it to the front page
No, it's because a nuclear reactor has a small but real risk for a Chernobyl or Fukushima like event. We are not good at managing risks of this impact size: it's a slippery slope if small disturbances are not taken seriously. It's not unlike the reporting of near misses in aviation.
Both events killed like less than a hundred people directly in total, maybe a few thousand if all externalities are accounted for. Meanwhile dam failures have killed several hundred thousand people. I've always wondered why anti-nuke people weren't also adamant anti-hydro as well.
"154,000 residents evacuated from the communities surrounding the plant due to the rising off-site levels of ambient ionizing radiation caused by airborne radioactive contamination from the damaged reactors." https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_Daiichi_nuclear_di...
Most studies seem to suggest that the evacuation ended up being much worse than doing nothing at all, no?
For example:
> “With hindsight, we can say the evacuation was a mistake,” says Philip Thomas, a professor of risk management at the University of Bristol and leader of a recent research project on nuclear accidents. “We would have recommended that nobody be evacuated.”