alt Hacker NewsThe main difference is that tiny mistakes in the nuclear industry can have massive consequences. A seemingly-trivial change can lead to continent-sized damages and permanent condemnation of city-sized areas of land.
Accidents in the fossil fuel industry are far more localized. Sure, you can blow up your own plant and kill a bunch of people, but it's not too hard to clean up the mess afterwards. Even something as horrific as the Deepwater Horizon disaster won't have much of a residual impact 10 years down the line.
Let me know how "not too hard" it is to clean this up: https://earthjustice.org/feature/coal-ash-states/virginia x50 states.
> A seemingly-trivial change can lead to continent-sized damages and permanent condemnation of city-sized areas of land.
Chernobyl wasn't a "seemingly-trivial change" -- it was several successive groups all choosing to do the worse-possible thing, and it still killed and harmed fewer people than the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bhopal_disaster