>A plant has to be well-maintained and competently run. Waste products have to be safely stored and transported. As soon as you add corporations to the mix, you've now created a profit motive to neglect safety and maintenance because the risk of disaster is low but the failure modes are incredibly large.
When are we outlawing hydroelectric dams? Accidents with those have killed far far more people.
Here are the 3 big problems with the pro-nuclear argument:
1. Using deaths as a metric;
2. Focusing on operational cost of a nuclear power plant rather than total cost (ie including capital cost). The total cost is borne out in the relatively high cost of nuclear power to users. If that point is even acknowledged, let alone conceded, it's just dismissed as the fault of government regulation or that scale will somehow magically solve the problem; and
3. Writing off disasters as irrelevant outliers because they're inconvenient to the argument. Less than 700 nuclear power plants have been built and we've had multiple huge disasters.
So are deaths a bad metric? And by "deaths" here I mean any form of the metric (eg absolute, per-kWh generated, etc). Because deaths doesn't capture the negative externalities and consequences of nuclear power. Chernobyl killed less than 100 directly. Who knows how many contracted various cancers in a wide area. But 1,000 suqare miles of land remains uninhabitable nearly four decades later with no real end in sight.
Deaths as a metric doesn't capture that, which is precisely why pro-nuclear advocates focus on it. Nuclear power has its own propaganda just like the oil and gas industry does.
The nuclear stans' focus on deaths may not be leading in the direction they want.
The way to account for the cost of deaths is by the "statical value of a human life", a finite quantity that is considered what would be reasonable to spend to avoid one death. The NRC uses a figure of $9 million when evaluating reactor safety systems.
Using that figure, deaths in normal operation contribute negligibly to the cost of energy from nuclear or renewables (but not for coal; there deaths contribute greatly to the real cost.) Because of this, if nuclear stans are focusing on deaths, what they're doing is implying that the $9 M figure is much too low. And that would imply that the NRC is not imposing enough safety systems on nuclear plants. I doubt this last point is one they'd be happy with.
When are we outlawing hydroelectric dams? Accidents with those have killed far far more people.