A good portion of people are morbidly afraid of nuclear reactors. The vast majority of environmentalists and nature activists heavily oppose nuclear reactors (which is highly ironic given that they are, by far, the least polluting form of energy production, even when taking account the mining of nuclear fuel) and fear them like the plague.
The notion seems to be that if there's a nuclear reactor accident it would be pretty much in essence like dropping a nuclear bomb on the city. Millions of deaths! The city, or perhaps the entire country, would turn into a nuclear wasteland!
But how dangerous are nuclear reactor accidents in reality?
By far the worst such accident that has ever happened is the Chernobyl one, which happened 1986. This was the absolutely worst-case scenario that could ever happen to a nuclear reactor: The entire roof of the reactor core was blown off by the steam explosion, and the entire core, including all the enriched uranium inside it, was completely exposed to the open air without any impediment for weeks, constantly emitting an amount of radiation an order of magnitude higher than what's sufficient to kill a person in minutes. What's worse, the steam explosion itself pulverized and dispersed a sizeable fraction of the enriched uranium into the atmosphere. (This was possible because the reactor had been constructed without a containment shield around it, which is standard for most other reactors in the world, because the USSR cheaped out and thought it impossible for the reactor to explode.)
It cannot possibly get worse than this, as this is arguably the absolutely worst-case scenario of a nuclear reactor accident. (Even a terrorist attack most probably wouldn't have made it worse.)
So how many people died because of the accident?
The estimate, taking into account all the factors, is that to this day up to 4000 people have died because of the radiation.
Four thousand is a quite sizeable number. However, it pales in comparison with more mundane causes of death. Consider, for example, that influenza kills a quarter to a half million people every single year. Almost 4000 people are killed in car accidents worldwide every single day. You only need to look at car accident fatalities for two days and your death count will be much higher than what over 30 years of Chernobyl has caused.
No other nuclear plant accident has come even close to that. The second-worst nuclear plant accident that has ever happened is that of Fukushima in 2011, due to a tsunami. Only one person died directly because of it (and it wasn't even due to radiation poisoning, but an accident during the cleanup.) A number of elderly people also died during the evacuation, but not directly because of the accident (eg. because of radiation poisoning) but because of the stress of the situation.
The third most notorious nuclear plant accident is that of the Three Mile Island, in Pennsylvania, United States, in 1979. Not a single death has been attributed to it.
So, I have to ask: Where exactly is the huge danger of nuclear reactors? Why all the fear?
Even in the absolutely worst-case scenario that's physically possible (and even that was possible only because the power plant lacked many of the safety features of most other plants) only caused about as many deaths in the span of 30 years as car accidents cause in one single day.
Yes, the irradiated environment around the accident will make the area uninhabitable for a really long time. However, this isn't so much a "danger" is it's an inconvenience. Can be a huge inconvenience, but not really a "danger". And even this is unlikely to happen with a modern nuclear reactor with all the physical safety measures in place (which make a Chernobyl scenario almost impossible, as it's very unlikely for the core to be exposed to the open air no matter what happens).
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