Does a coal plant "kill more in a few weeks than nuclear has ever killed"?

Question

Director Oliver Stone and Prof. Joshua Goldstein have created a film named "Nuclear Now", arguing in favor of installing more (modern) nuclear power plants to combat climate change and generally. In this interview on the Hill's 'Rising TV', Prof. Goldstein makes the following claim around 19:10 :

... you know, a coal plant, on a good day when it's operating normally, kills more people in a few weeks than nuclear power has ever killed...

now, naturally, one has to quantify what size/output coal plant and how many weeks are a few weeks, but - how true is this statement?

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_{Note: Regardless of whether this is true or not, that is a manipulative statement in at least several ways: The debate is not coal-vs-nuclear but more nuclear-vs-renewables-plus-storage; coal technology can likely be improved so that the pollution effects are reduced to almost zero, just like nuclear technology can likely be improved to what its proponents argue for; and finally and most importantly - the counting of deaths should be of estimated deaths, not just the actual deaths so far: If a nuclear plant has a X% change of emitting large amounts of radioactive material into the ocean or a wide populated area, so as to cause N deaths, but it has never actually done so, it's true that it has killed nobody, but its expected kills are N * X% (simplistically).}

Answer 1

The claim as made in the original quote is fairly easy to debunk with sources from the comments because it compares deaths due to all nuclear power over all time with deaths of a single coal power plant over a few weeks.

First nuclear from user Graffito: 'a report titled "The Health Effects of Chernobyl" by International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War (IPPNW) communicates on a number between 10,000 and 25,000 additional fatalities due to cancer and leukaemia.' We will use the 10,000 as a low estimate for total nuclear deaths.

Now consider the country as Poland as a randomly chosen example. There are 50 coal power plants in Poland unless I miscounted the list. Hence according to this claim coal power plants in Poland would have to kill more than 500,000 people every few weeks. Poland has around 38 million inhabitants and a death rateof 13.6 per 1000 per year which gives approximately 516,000 deaths per year in total from all causes combined. So whatever the number of deaths due to coal power plants in Poland actually is, it is certainly several orders of magnitude smaller than claimed.

One could argue that Polish power plants kill people in other countries but other countries have coal power plants as well so this wouldn't change the answer that dramatically. The original claim is so way over the top wrong that no accurate accounting of deaths due to coal power plants is needed to debunk it.

Answer 2

Yes, that's easy to say because cancer statistics are easier to hide, deny and cover up compared to a guy falling from a wind turbine. 500 cancers from a smuggled waste are easy to hide and forget. The source information is inaccurate for that reason: if baseline cancer rates raise by 0.05% worldwide, (which they probably have), that's 5,000 extra cancer-related deaths per year which are undetectable and raise nuclear fatality much higher than wind and solar. (I think accountable nuclear is much better than coal and oil BTW)

This oncologist suggests that world cancer deaths were raised 0.1 percent annually from Chernobyl only, which represents 10,000 added deaths anually. 0.1% doesn't fit into uncertainty coefficients so it's just based on sievert doseage rise from ambient radioactivity.

Other sources of ambient radioactivity are:

1. Toxic waste dumping by Italian mafia,
2. Uranium mining and milling washing downstream into fishing lakes and water table in Limousin region, USA, Namibia, Egypt, and many other countries.
3. Plutonium based weapons from in Iraq and Ukraine which fragment upon impact, which come from nuclear power stations and are responsible for hundreds of cancers over the years.
4. Fukushima waste water

Ultimately, ambient radioactivity is an undetectable form of fatality compared to wind workers falling during maintenance.

Nuclear also has a very high fatality potential if it is promoted worldwide, considering current conflicts, government anarchies and corruption:

Only nine reactor-produced isotopes stand out as being suitable for radiological terror: americium-241, californium-252, caesium-137, cobalt-60, iridium-192, plutonium-238, polonium-210, radium-226 and strontium-90,[17] and even from these it is possible that radium-226 and polonium-210 do not pose a significant threat.[18] Of these sources the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission has estimated that within the U.S., approximately one source is lost, abandoned or stolen every day of the year. Within the European Union the annual estimate is 70.[19] There exist thousands of such "orphan" sources scattered throughout the world, but of those reported lost, no more than an estimated 20 percent can be classified as potential high security concerns if used in a radiological dispersal device. (wiki)