The total death toll and the number of people suffering health issues (past and present) due to coal are orders of magnitude larger than those due to nuclear power (not to even mention the damage to the environment!). The problem is that people respond more to one-time big disasters than to numbers over time. Something like Chornobyl is terrifying and a big deal, so people remember it. They don’t remember every Tom, Dick and Harry that’s died over the years due to black lung or accidents or other stuff from coal.

You can even see this attitude in other ways too. It seems like a lot of Americans are still suffering mass trauma from 9/11 and accept the most horrific Patriot Act-type shit because of it. But in the end, it was less than 3000 people who died in the attack (and don’t get me wrong, it was terrible!), but waaaaaaay more people die (and have died) from lack of (access to) healthcare, and it seems that still barely anyone is actually trying to fix that. Or a mass shooting that kills 11 people, that’s a big deal, right? But the fact that over a million Americans died due to Covid didn’t really register as a disaster for a lot of people.

Nuclear power is such a no-brainer to me, but it sounds ‘scary’ and lots of people don’t understand it, which makes it even more scary. Plus, of course the fossil fuel industry propaganda and lobbying, and the memory of people who know other people who used to work in coal towns and had pretty decent lives. Or the “what about nuclear waste!”-crap that always comes up. Yes, nuclear waste is a thing, but let’s put it next to all the damaging crap that coal mines produce, accumulated. It’s way worse.

Anyway. It’s hard to fight all that, even when rationally, statistically, nuclear power should be a no-brainer. Edit: and there is no political will either, it seems. Whether it’s because they love their fossil fuel bribes or because they’re too scared to lose some voters… they’ll never do good things just to do good.

Edit: just to be clear, it’s definitely not a USA-exclusive problem. I currently live in Germany and their weird relationship to nuclear power is also batshit. All based on fear and bullshit.