If you don’t pursue safety in a way that is cost effective, you are killing people. -- [David Okrent, Past chairman, Advisory Committee on Reactor Safeguards]

Suppose early in 1979, you asked yourself what is the most definitive experiment we could do to learn about the radioactive harm associated with a nuclear power plant release. The obvious answer: a big release would be that experiment. But you would immediately reject that idea on both ethical and economic grounds. Since then we’ve inadvertently run that experiment three times. Let’s look at the results. //

Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, Fukushima //

So we did the definitive experiment. The result: even in a very large power plant release, dose rates to the public are almost never higher than the dose rates our bodies know how to handle. Nature had to equip us with those repair systems to cope with the onslaught of DNA damage from our internal metabolic processes, which damage our DNA at a rate that is at least 25,000 times higher than the damage rate from average background radiation.

Nuclear power plant casualties are extremely expensive economically, which means it’s in the operators’ interest to build robust plants and operate them prudently. But from a public, radiation point of view almost all releases will produce no detectable harm, and the very worst releases are no worse than a bad refinery fire at killing the public.

This puts nuclear in the same category as wind and solar, when it comes to directly killing people per TWh of electricity, and orders of magnitude less directly deadly than coal plants. But it’s the indirect deaths that really count. The easiest way to kill a lot of people is to make them poorer. With a few exceptions, wind and solar will do that. Nuclear will too unless it is as cheap as coal. Nuclear has been cheaper than coal, and can be cheaper again; but only if we regulate nuclear in a way that eliminates barriers to entry and forces the vendors to compete on an even playing field. Right now we are doing exactly the opposite. We are killing people.