Doesn't change the end result. Hell, you can add every person who died in the atomic bombings to the nuclear tally (even though that makes no sense at all), and it still won't change the result.
No, you don’t get 2.5 million deaths per year from fossil fuel usage. Though a few seriously flawed studies have gotten some very extreme numbers.
For example respiratory diseases represent ~5% of all Chinese deaths or about 500,000 in 2020. Which is a horrific sign of air pollution except China also has 350 million smokers. Looking at the non smoker population you see air pollution as a major factor, but again not all air pollution is from fossil fuels.
Air pollution is also associated to strokes and heart attacks, but again other factors are involved.
Sure, but if you’re planning a new thing saying we stopped doing dumb stuff in the last isn’t a great justification.
The general public became scared of radiation in part because of the rapid flip flop from this stuff is safe and useful to holy shit no don’t do any of that.
> Sure, but if you’re planning a new thing saying we stopped doing dumb stuff in the last isn’t a great justification.
I'm not sure that argument really works though.
When it comes to radiation, we understand the dangers of radiation a lot more now than Marie Curie did, and we can argue the merits of SMR's based on the knowledge that we've gained.
Furthermore, the argument is very overly general. Sure, it's true that people made a lot of mistakes because we didn't fully understand the dangers of radiation at first. But we're talking about SMR's to generate electricity here, and people didn't even fully understand the dangers of electricity at first, either. The same could be said about fossil fuels.
That leads us to a much different conclusion--don't invent fundamentally new things. Radiation and fission aren't fundamentally new. They're understood, and the risks are understood.
For context the Radium girls won their lawsuit from 1927. By 1950 the belief was all radiation exposure resulted in increased risks, yet these things where used into the 1970’s.
Hell, the nuclear industry continued to use known inherently unsafe designs. Fukushima wasn’t really a failure due to a tidal wave, it’s a failure due to requirements for active cooling. Inherently safe means turn the lights off and come back in a year and it’s fine, not everything is fine as long as you keep doing X.