Comment by jjk166

> The incident was a typhoon that caused 60 dam failures in a densely populated area prone to flooding.

So we're not counting natural disasters that cause power infrastructure failure? I take it you don't consider the events of the Tohoku earthquake and tsunami to be a nuclear accident then.

> With nuclear, people in Scotland are in danger from a plant in the Ukraine, can't do anything to protect themselves from it, and have to live with the consequences for 30+ years. That's much worse by any metric.

And people in Scotland are in substantially greater danger from the emissions of coal plants in China, and will be until the world stops burning coal.

> Deepwater horizon was bad, but nowhere near as bad as Chernobyl or Fukushima.

It was much worse in terms of environmental impact, particularly the area impacted.

> Also it wasn't a power plant

I don't see any reason to limit the discussion to electrical power plants.

> Risk is often defined as consequence x likelihood

I was being generous in only looking at consequences without considering likelihood. The consequences are no worse than the dominant alternatives, but the likelihood has been astronomically less, hence Nuclear has been the safest power source ever utilized by mankind. So yes, in a way nuclear's risk is unique - uniquely low. I fully agree this should be accepted and considered in any discussion.