It's safe except where it REALLY isn't. You volunteering to move in close proximity to the Chernobyl plant? How about Fukashima? I even agree with your general point that nuclear's safety record is overall pretty good but your evaluation metric isn't the only relevant one and possibly not the most important. Risk is not simply a calculation of historical outcomes but also potential future outcomes. Nuclear might be safer now but it is not clear that it will remain so. Really it would only take a small number (possibly just 1) of nuclear accidents catch up in the number of deaths caused.
I volunteer to live within 15km of any new nuclear power plant built with current technology and safety margins.
Your statement about only a few or possibly one nuclear accident catching up to the number of deaths caused by other methods of power generation is absolutely absurd. More than a million people die yearly because of accidents and air pollution caused by other means of energy production. That would mean we'd have to have 500 Chernobyls a year to come even close.
The devastation caused by the Chernobyl accident is extremely limited and even if it happened once a year, nuclear would still be WAY safer than coal.
AND: The Chernobyl accident should NOT be attributed to a failure at a power plant - the accident was caused by an insane experiment combined with faulty equipment. Without the mad experiment the had no business being run at a normal power plant, there would have been no accident.
Fukashima is the only large scale accident under "normal" operating conditions - and by "normal" in this case we have waves significantly larger than the safety margins the plant was built to withstand. A new plant would have been constructed with better safety margins, but they were good enough for approval some 50 years ago - a time when we were less risk-adverse as a culture.
And remind me again, what's the number of fatalities from Fukashima? It's the 2nd largest accident and the number of confirmed fatalities has so far stopped at 2. Estimates of long term fatalities stop at about a 1000. That's 1/1000 of last years coal fatalities.
Nuclear pollution is (thankfully) infrequent but VERY severe when it occurs. When a nuke plant goes bad it can easily make an area uninhabitable for centuries. Coal plants are pretty nasty too but not as acutely and the cleanup is far quicker in terms of human lifetimes. Neither is without its drawbacks.
Plus you seem to be forgetting that nuclear power is presently inseparable from the potential to create nuclear weapons which in turn have the potential to kill billions. Coal might slowly choke us to death but nuclear weapons could erase that deaths/TWh gap within hours. I'm not opposed to nuclear power (in fact I think it is underutilized) but let's not pretend that there are no safety issues involved. There are without question governments and political leaders who I genuinely think should be kept away from nuclear power because of the proliferation problem. Even reactors like Thorium designs which make weapons harder still don't eliminate the problem entirely.
Nuclear weapons is irrelevant. Modern plants does not produce weapons grade materials in any meaningful quantities, and even if they did - that should not stop stable democracies from implementing them. I'm not suggesting building a 1. or 2. generation plant in Afghanistan.
Small terrorist states would not be able to produce nuclear weapons capable of killing billions as you say. Worst case (and then I really mean worst case) is a single city attack - 1 - 20 million people. That fissionable material would however never come from a modern power plant in the US or Europe.
