Which is a good story to tell all those techno-naive who go on about the safety of modern nuclear reactors and such (it's always past designs that are at fault)...
When there's money to be made by cheapening out (on construction, safety, disposal, testing, quality of employees, etc), whether the risk to others (and sometimes even to self), some people will cheapen out.
Add human error to that, and it's better if the whole thing happens to some old-style electricity factory, and not to one whose waste needs safe storage for decades, and an accident can kill hundreds of thousands.
If anything, that would be an argument against using coat factories too -- not an argument in favor of nuclear factories.
That said, the whole comparison that makes it as coal factories produce "more radioactive" waste, is based on comparing with "normal" nuclear factory emissions, under their 'theoretical' operation. Not the total long term potential, when one includes catastrophes, breakdowns, lousy waste containment and disposal, or the mafia just throwing it in the sea in the calculation.
> That said, the whole comparison that makes it as coal factories produce "more radioactive" waste
The important thing to look at isn't what power source produces the "most radioactive" waste, it's the actual death tolls per KWh of different power sources. And coal is about 1000 times worse, both worldwide and in the US, _counting_ Chernobyl and Fukushima.
When there's money to be made by cheapening out (on construction, safety, disposal, testing, quality of employees, etc), whether the risk to others (and sometimes even to self), some people will cheapen out.
Add human error to that, and it's better if the whole thing happens to some old-style electricity factory, and not to one whose waste needs safe storage for decades, and an accident can kill hundreds of thousands.