You can't simultaneously accuse your OP of being disingenuous about nuclear power (which he is, and I agree), then claim there have been no nuclear disasters, because that is probably more disingenuous than the original claim. That's just not true.
Are we working with the same definition of the word disaster? Even bloody Wikipedia, which I'd hardly call the tome of truth, calls Chernobyl a disaster[1]. Human life, property damage (ask Belarus), worldwide fallout...you don't get to rewrite what disaster means so that nuclear power keeps an untarnished image. There has been at least one. Debatably -- and I don't care to get into it -- there could now be as many as three.
There's a parallel with airliner crashes. More people die every day on highways, but an airliner going down is a very serious thing because there are hundreds of lives suddenly ended. So it was with Chernobyl: due to a catastrophic failure of engineering, humanity, and government, dozens of peoples' lives suddenly ended. You can argue that tens of thousands of lives are now in jeopardy due to the radiological effects. That is a disaster, regardless of any pro/anti-nuclear agenda.
I was speaking about disaster in an absolute sense, not a relative one. When you only have ten or so incidents to go by, then Chernobyl and three mile island are going to be called disasters, as far as nuclear disasters go. In terms of real disasters, when measured in human deaths, they are tiny footnotes in history, statistically irrelevant.
Hundreds of people die every year, just mining coal. How many people have died from nuclear power generators in their entire history? Disingenuous indeed.
There are a lot of relevant statistics in that document, such as the thousands of thyroid cancer cases directly attributed to the radiation exposure, not to mention the tens of firefighters that died saving the rest of the world. I would hate to live in your world, where there's a threshold of death to call something a disaster -- you are really minimizing the effects on hundreds of thousands (potentially millions) of people, simply because they haven't died yet or at all. How about getting uprooted from their homes and lives?
Just as I pointed out with my airliner analogy, the deaths from mining coal are over time, and many probably attributable to basic industrial accidents. Black lung has kind of been figured out, hasn't it? Five hundred coal miners didn't wake up on a Tuesday and die from coal poisoning, and as a result we're not talking about a disaster that needs investigation with coal power production.
I agree that nuclear power is statistically safe, but you are really skewing facts and doing a great disservice to less-educated readers about the (real) dangers of nuclear power, and calling it science elsewhere in this thread. This isn't a binary proposition -- something can be really safe and have the occasional Big Deal. Just like air travel.
You can't simultaneously accuse your OP of being disingenuous about nuclear power (which he is, and I agree), then claim there have been no nuclear disasters, because that is probably more disingenuous than the original claim. That's just not true.
Are we working with the same definition of the word disaster? Even bloody Wikipedia, which I'd hardly call the tome of truth, calls Chernobyl a disaster[1]. Human life, property damage (ask Belarus), worldwide fallout...you don't get to rewrite what disaster means so that nuclear power keeps an untarnished image. There has been at least one. Debatably -- and I don't care to get into it -- there could now be as many as three.
There's a parallel with airliner crashes. More people die every day on highways, but an airliner going down is a very serious thing because there are hundreds of lives suddenly ended. So it was with Chernobyl: due to a catastrophic failure of engineering, humanity, and government, dozens of peoples' lives suddenly ended. You can argue that tens of thousands of lives are now in jeopardy due to the radiological effects. That is a disaster, regardless of any pro/anti-nuclear agenda.
[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl_disaster