The context is a long string of nuclear incidents throughout the Cold War through to the ‘90s.
Not just Chernobyl, not just Fukushima, but the string of disasters at Windscale / Sellafield and many others across the globe.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nuclear_power_accident...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nuclear_and_radiation_...
These disasters were huge, newsworthy and alarmingly regular. People read about those getting sick and dying directly as a result. They felt the cleanup costs as taxpayers. They saw how land became unusable after a large event, and, especially terrifying for those who had lived as adults through Cold War, saw the radioactive fallout blown across international borders by the wind.
It’s not Greenpeace or an anti-nuclear lobby who caused the widespread public reaction to nuclear. It was the public reaction seeing it with their own eyes, and making an understandable decision that they didn’t like the risks.
Chernobyl was one hammer blow to the coffin lid, Fukushima the second, but nuclear power was already half-dead before either of those events, kept alive only by unpopular political necessity.
I’m not even anti-nuclear myself, but let’s be clear: the worldwide nuclear energy industry is itself to blame for the lack of faith in nuclear energy.
Nuke plants are scary when they fail, but the actual threat is way lower than we play it out to be.
People are irrationally scared by large incidents and under-represent the regular deaths and costs that occur during operation.
People agree with fatalities per hour of travel because it makes sense. If you're a really frequent flyer, you are more likely to die. In nuclear, I don't give a crap how many watt hour the plant 1000km away from me is generating, I don't want it to affect me. I am however OK with the plant next door affecting me, because I have a say in that. I can choose to live elsewhere.
Someone mentioned rooftop solar causing more deaths. If my rooftop solar falls on my head, only I die.
You can't just reduce everything to aggregate statistics. The relationship and proximity of the affected to the thing that causes the accident also matters.
> Coal
Yes, but the miners die, and only his family face the consequences. Some unrelated guy 50km away doesn't. BIG difference.
Now, modern nuclear plants have way better containment, and e.g I advocate heavily for SMRs [1]. But the fear of nuclear pre-SMR is completely justified and correct as I argued above.
[1] I suppose practically, the ones with 10km radius are also OK. Gen III I think? That is a reasonable region to tell people "if you live here, you might have to evacuate and you might be screwed". Any system with a zone beyond that should always be opposed.