>But anti-nuke makes headlines, and gets people fired up, and is better for the oil and coal industries. Agreed. Much as routine, daily road deaths don't typic

>But anti-nuke makes headlines, and gets people fired up, and is better for the oil and coal industries. Agreed. Much as routine, daily road deaths don't typically make the headlines, the guy down the road dying of lung cancer is hardly newsworthy. In my experience most people are totally unaware of the enormous number of deaths attributed to coal burning (estimated at ~1 million per year globally by the WHO in 2008 [0]) I don't know the quality of the research, but in the wake of the Fukishima accident, NASA researchers published the following report, which estimated the number of deaths avoided by the use of nuclear power as a substitute of fossil fuel based power generation: "Using historical production data, we calculate that global nuclear power has prevented an average of 1.84 million air pollution-related deaths and 64 gigatonnes of CO2-equivalent (GtCO2-eq) greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions that would have resulted from fossil fuel burning. On the basis of global projection data that take into account the effects of the Fukushima accident, we find that nuclear power could additionally prevent an average of 420,000-7.04 million deaths and 80-240 GtCO2-eq emissions due to fossil fuels by midcentury, depending on which fuel it replaces." [1] [2] [0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_impact_of_the_coal_industry http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_impact_of_the_coa... [1] http://www.giss.nasa.gov/research/briefs/kharecha_02/ http://www.giss.nasa.gov/research/briefs/kharecha_02/ (summary) [2] http://pubs.giss.nasa.gov/docs/2013/2013_Kharecha_Hansen_1.pdf http://pubs.giss.nasa.gov/docs/2013/2013_Kharecha_Hansen_1.p... (report)