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.
This is a crazy understatement of just how many human-years of life have been lost due to that incident. How many people got leukemia in neighboring countries and other complications that cut their lives short. I am amazed this isn't more widely known, and I always find it suspicious when people downplay the real extent of the damage that has been done, to human lives.
Just saying that only 50 people died is pretty messed up in my opinion.