You confuse two sorts of risks Jonathan. You are quite right is saying nuclear is safe when it comes to killing people. It kills far less people per joule produced than coal, or hydro. Hydro is in fact the worst. The nuclear industry regularly point as far as deaths are concerned, they are the least risky technology. Fukushima just proved that point once again.

But there is a reason they point it out. That is because it is, indisputably, the most financially risky of all production methods. In putting some 1000's of square kilometers of land out of production for decades in a country that has a shortage of it, Fukushima proved that yet again. An extraordinary percentage of nuclear plants (over 30%) fail before their economic life times are up - which means the investors (who have to take out 30 years loans to finance the hugely expensive things) lose money. This why in the US no nuclear plant has been commissioned in recent times built without the tax payers providing a loan guarantee for the entire cost. Ie, the tax payer takes on the risk. In the US the tax payer also took on the risk for long term (10,000 years) disposal of waste. Yukka mountain. It cost some $9B. But it also failed.

It needn't be this way. There are experimental nuclear plant designs that are burn 98% of their fuel instead of 0.2% so the waste storage becomes tractable, mostly fail safe and small enough so the effects aren't disastrous if the do fail. In other words, we can build nuclear plants that don't externalise their costs to society. But guess what - they will cost billions to make work, and will be more expensive per joule when they do.

So what does the nuclear industry do - they beat the "we are low risk drum", so we the tax payer take on this "low" risk. The other energy options can't externalise risk in this way. It's a huge bloody great conn, to get an unfair advantage. And you, Jonathan, have made yourself part of it.