(Interesting note: rooftop solar is dangerous because people fall off their roofs during the process of installing it.)
But the punchline to this data, in graphical form (from here):
That's graphically the relative per-TWH-death rate for nuclear, oil, and coal. Keep in mind that if you wanted to get absolute (ie the total number of people killed by power generation source), since nuclear is about 6% of global power generation and coal is 26%, the coal block would end up four times the size of its block here while nuclear would stay the same size.
Which is safest now?
Also interesting, a comment on this page (where incidentally you can play with the graphings yourself):
Even Chernobyl itself produced 4GW for 23 years. That's 800000 TWh. Let's say it ran at quarter capacity (200000 TWh) and the absolute highball estimates from Green Peace are true (around 200000 lives lost). Such an absurd edge case of bad numbers, it's still fairly safe.The bottom line for me is: generating electricity has side-effects on the surrounding society, one that can be measured in lives. People who argue that nuclear is ridiculously dangerous (which, during accidents, it absolutely is) are willingly blind to the fact that other "less dangerous" forms of electricity generation actually harm more people, both in absolute terms and in proportion to the actual power being generated.
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