The death tolls tell a different story.
You aren't alone in this belief, but I've never really understood it. Banqiao dam bursts and kills 170,000 people: hydro is fine, we should do more. Chernobyl melts down and kills 30: nuclear power is inherently unsafe!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dam_failure
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_and_radiation_accident...
If a reactor bursts it might not kill lots of people but it will devastate a large area for a very long time. We still do not know internal details about the Fukushima reactors because not even robots can go there.
A dam burst is a nightmare but it is a nightmare which is easy to clean up afterwards. A reactor catastrophe is a nightmare nobody knows how to clean up at all.
The construction of the Three Gorges (2012) dam flooded 13 cities, 140 towns and 1350 villages, as well as 1,300 archaeological sites, and caused relocation of 1.24m citizens -- this is permanent and was done entirely on purpose, planned years in advance. Fukushima (2011) has a 20km exclusion zone that is now gradually being reopened a few years later, and 100,000 persons are still displaced.
One of these are acceptable collateral damage in the battle against climate change and the other is so bad that it constitutes conclusive evidence of the fundamental futility of the very technology itself. But you need to drink a lot of koolaid to see which is which on face value.
“I know three women my age (between 30–40) who have experienced thyroid cancer. When one of them was surprised to get the diagnosis, her doctor told her they see women our age from the Soviet Union very frequently with the same. Not a coincidence.” — Z. K.
Neither are you, you're speculating that they must exist in high numbers. That quote doesn't show anything, that could be a coincidence and frequently is a vague term for a very busy individual.
There has been a noticeable increase in thyroid cancer incidents in the area, but treated thyroid cancer is the second least fatal cancer. About 93% of people are alive thirty years later.
The highest peer reviewed studies estimate 27,000 deaths, still far below the Banqiao dam failure.
[1] http://www.who.int/mediacentre/news/releases/2005/pr38/en/
The point is, there is no good outcome in a pissing match over what has the most negative impact when we routinely ignore any number of causes of death that we can be fixing but don't.
The threat to hydro is the reclamation of environment which tends to go unchallenged in many parts because of the feel good lobby.
Military reactor designs are generally less safe. Civilian designs were usually OK in the USSR.
The tsunami killed two workers, but the nuclear incident as such didn't kill a single person.
On the other hand, dangers of nuclear is a very recent thing. Common people's primary recollection point of nuclear is probably nuclear bomb.
