Nuclear reactors don't tend to explode, well with a nuclear explosion anyway. They might erupt in a steam explosion if the pressure gets too high, aka Chernobyl. Meltdowns aren't overly dangerous to those around the plant, as long as it doesn't breach containment, and again, fire isn't a serious danger as long as the reactor is not breached and can be shutdown safely.
The biggest issue is a breach of the reactor, but even in the worse case senario (Chernobyl) we're looking at a very low death toll, and that is an estimated one over decades, so not people killed outright, but rather people's lives shortened from what they would have been, assuming they don't get killed by something else first.
This is the thing, we've seen the absolute worst case senario and compared to other industrial accidents, it wasn't actually that bad, and certainly wasn't world destroying.
This bears repeating, I think, and also needs reinforcing.
See, I think that a lot of anti-nuclear people read "Chernobyl really wasn't the utter world-shattering disaster people think it was, and it's not as bad as equally big industrial accidents in other fields" and read "Chernobyl wasn't...bad.". They tend to, or give the impression they tend to, focus on the idea that we are saying it was a storm in a teacup, to use my ill-advised phrase from earlier in the thread.
They see us saying "You know, 4000 deaths and a small number of deformities and cancer cases isn't as serious as some people assume that Chernobyl was" and think we're saying it wasn't serious. This couldn't be further from the truth. Yeah, it was serious, and yes, if they are totally mismanaged, out of date or just plain dangerously designed nuclear power can be a very dangerous thing,
but it isn't as serious as some people think. Chernobyl was, I believe, one of the first nuclear power plants built anywhere in the world, and as such had a very low margin of safety compared to modern plants. Equally unfortunate was that it was Soviet in design, which meant that safety probably wasn't the first priority, and standards were lax. That it went up at all was mostly due to some idiots who were supposed to be working properly but decided not to, and that it wasn't contained was a fault that to the best of my knowledge, no modern plant or any plant that may be built in the future will have.
Chernobyl. Was. Awful. It was the worst nuclear disaster so far, and is pretty much destined to be the worst nuclear disaster that has or will ever occur, and it had both a lower death toll, immediate and future combined, than an equally disastrous catastrophe at a coil or oil plant. If that doesn't hint that nuclear power is actually pretty safe, I don't know what does, quite frankly.
In the US alone, there were 437 deaths between the years of 1996 and 2009. That averages out to what, 31 deaths per year? Nuclear power has been with us for 57 years,
since the Obninsk reactor went online (incidentally, it started operations in 1954 and ceased in 2002 and had a grand total of 0 accidents and 0 attributable deaths).
If we take the 31 as an average over 57 years (and that's being conservative, I believe) for deaths in the coal industry in the US alone, that leads to a total of 1767 deaths in the coal industry
in one country during the time period that nuclear power has or will kill 4000. The US has one of the best safety recording in the coal industry, I believe, and even it has led to a death toll of 44.175% that of the entire world's nuclear industry. If you take other countries with similar figures and similar safety standards into account, the death toll would easily outstrip nuclear. If you take less developed and less safety concious countries into account such as China...
