Some people may feel that the statistics above on nuclear are unexpectedly low, given the accidents at Chernobyl and Fukushima. The World Health Organization estimates 4,000 deaths, including cancers, from Chernobyl, and there were one or two thousand deaths from the hasty and unnecessesary evacuation of the area around Fukushima. No one died at Three Mile Island.

So that's something like 6,000 deaths, and bear in mind that the statistics are deaths per unit amount of energy, and the human race has obtained an absolutely huge amount of energy from nuclear power by this point.

The real tragedy of Fukushima is that Germany shut down a number of nuclear plants in reaction to it, burned very dirty, high-pollution coal to replace the energy, and the pollution from that coal combustion has killed far more Germans than the number of Japanese who died in the evacuation from Fukushima.

Its so common for thousands of people to die from coal pollution that it doesn't make the news. If anyone dies from radiation, it's world headlines.

It should be noted that the Chernobyl plant was just horribly unsafe by American standards, having no containment vessel and other flaws. There is no expectation that anybody, anywhere in the world, will build a plant anywhere near that unsafe in the future, so the future global death rate from nuclear should be far below the past death rate.

Chernobyl did expose a lot of people to a lot of radiation, but far fewer of them got sick than was expected. So one of the lessons of Chernobyl is that radiation is less dangerous than was previously supposed.