In the past 20 years, it's killed 4 million people globally:
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-023-02765-y
It's projected to kill 14 million ANNUALLY by 2050:
https://www.weforum.org/press/2024/01/wef24-climate-crisis-health/
After Fukushima, Japan had resorted to coal and natural gas to replace shuttered nuclear reactors, dumping millions of extra tons of carbon into the atmosphere. Bringing the reactors back online helped stop this carbon surge:
https://www.straitstimes.com/asia/east-asia/japans-annual-emissions-falls-to-record-low-as-industrial-pollution-shrinks
Japan’s emissions surged after the 2011 Fukushima nuclear disaster led to reactor shutdowns and heightened dependence on fossil fuels. Emissions peaked at 1.4 billion tonnes in 2013/14 but have since declined, helped by greater use of renewable energy and the gradual resumption of reactors.
Even the absolute worst-case scenarios for reactor meltdowns and radioactive release don't come close to those numbers. Over the next 50 years, the number of possible deaths from Fukushima will be a fraction of a percentage of the deaths from fossil fuels.
Carbon emissions are far, far more lethal than anything nuclear power can cause. People need to understand this better. A coal plant is more dangerous than a nuclear reactor. A natural gas power plant, even used to back up wind and solar farms, is more dangerous than a nuclear reactor. A fleet of a million gas-powered cars in a city is more dangerous than a nuclear power plant.
Fossil fuels are most lethal when they working right, while nuclear reactors become lethal when everything goes wrong.
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