> 3. Here's the important one: you need to look at failure modes. Coal plants pollute but they also do it very slowly and no coal plant has ever blown up to the

> 3. Here's the important one: you need to look at failure modes. Coal plants pollute but they also do it very slowly and no coal plant has ever blown up to the point where it's made 1000 square miles of land uninhabitable for decades (to compare, the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone is 1000 square miles). I'm afraid I can't find the article right now, so I don't have the exact statistics, but I have read that a large coal plant operating normally for 20 years releases more radioactive particles into the atmosphere than Chernobyl did. (There's a lot of trace radioactives in coal.) Nuclear plants that melted down catastrophically every 20 years, like clockwork, might still be safer than coal plants operating perfectly.