3. TIL nuclear power is by far safest power source in the world, and yet it is also...

TIL nuclear power is by far safest power source in the world, and yet it is also the most feared.

Your comment is incredibly depressing. It illustrates a fundamental lack of understanding of statistics and most likely the unwillingness to understand it. You just picked that line up somewhere and recite it but never once tried to understand it.

Air Traffic is the safest if you account for miles traveled. Miles traveled has become an irrelevant metric. The Space shuttle wasn't so bad if you look at its safety record per miles traveled, yet it killed 4% of all the people who ever traveled with it. The only relevant safety metric is per trip not per distance. So if i'm asking myself what the odds are that my next business trip is going to kill me it makes no difference whether the trip is 10000 Miles to Australia or 200 Miles to the next city. Its a single trip, that is what counts. How likely is a plane going to kill you once you set foot into it vs. a car?

If you turn to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aviation_safety you will quickly discover that on a per journey base a plane is three times more likely to kill you than a trip by car. Suprise! You ever heard that the trip to the airport is more dangerous than the flight? Well that is utter bullshit. On a per trip basis you are three times more likely to die when you enter a plane compared to when you enter a car. Think about that for a moment...

And now lets apply this to nuclear power. What if the metric is not accident per KWH but accident per power plant? Today the total number of nuclear power plants is 442. Of those 2 exploded catastrophically. 0.5% of all existing nuclear power plants exploded in a way that contaminated an area of at least 30 Miles radius. This is only taking the two worst accidents into account. Not a particulary good safety record either.

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