I dispute this number. Are you considering roof mounted residential solar? Most solar in a solar-powered world will be on the ground.

This is a poor metric to use. The official death count from Chernobyl was 31. It may be as high as 50. There are probably more deaths attributable through long-term effects, etc but you start getting into subjective modeling to figure out a number for that.

It's almost 40 years later and the absolute exclusion zone is still 1,000 square miles. Treating this as only 31 (or 50) deaths grossly under-represents the magnitude of the disaster.

1. Using deaths as a metric;

2. Focusing on operational cost of a nuclear power plant rather than total cost (ie including capital cost). The total cost is borne out in the relatively high cost of nuclear power to users. If that point is even acknowledged, let alone conceded, it's just dismissed as the fault of government regulation or that scale will somehow magically solve the problem; and

3. Writing off disasters as irrelevant outliers because they're inconvenient to the argument. Less than 700 nuclear power plants have been built and we've had multiple huge disasters.

So are deaths a bad metric? And by "deaths" here I mean any form of the metric (eg absolute, per-kWh generated, etc). Because deaths doesn't capture the negative externalities and consequences of nuclear power. Chernobyl killed less than 100 directly. Who knows how many contracted various cancers in a wide area. But 1,000 suqare miles of land remains uninhabitable nearly four decades later with no real end in sight.

Deaths as a metric doesn't capture that, which is precisely why pro-nuclear advocates focus on it. Nuclear power has its own propaganda just like the oil and gas industry does.

A serious question I don't have an answer to: is Chernobyl the worst-case scenario? Is there a way for there to be an even worse disaster? I do not know.

Though really we can walk and chew bubble gum. Build reactors and more renewables. I can't put a nuclear reactor on the roof of my home after all! I just really feel like this trope that anti-nuclear sentiment is why we don't have nuclear reactors everywhere has always felt weird when we're talking about market-based economies. Maybe it's just that unworkable in general! Why else would we not build these supposed money printers?