[dismayedjim]

You can't wipe a continent out with the worst case coal plant failure. A reactor going critical and exploding, however "impossible" would do just that. Look at the Saudi plant going up. It is jokingly referred to as "a car with no seatbelts".

[ashtonkem]

You’d be surprised how many people die every year from coal power exhaust.

People naturally overweight low frequency high impact events like a nuclear meltdown but drastically undervalue high frequency low impact events. Someone dying early because they lived too close to a coal plant doesn’t make the news, but in terms of actual human impact it trounces nuclear’s impact by multiple orders of magnitude.

[ben-schaaf]

Coal power plants also carry a lot more radiation into their surrounding environment than nuclear power plants: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/coal-ash-is-more-...

[EricE]

Yes, the real irony - coal plants release more radiation into the environment than nuclear plants ever have - including Chernobyl.

[ashtonkem]

A great example of a low impact, high frequency event being underweighted.

[Vecr]

You can't even wipe out a continent with a fusion bomb, how would a nuclear power plant even have enough material to be that damaging? Yeah, it might spread a bit of radiation if the entertainments cracked open like an egg, but that would be very obvious if terrorists, say, were trying that.

[kolinko]

We are slowly wiping out the whole planet with coal now.

[lambda_obrien]

Research what a critical fission reaction is, then come back and figure out why your sentence doesn't make sense.