Pollution from fossil fuels kills relatively quickly. Pollution from nuclear fuels remains dangerous for thousands of years. The deadliness of all forms of power depend strongly on regulations.
The jury is still out on which will kill more in the end. Though so far nuclear is looking really, really good.
> The deadliness of all forms of power depend strongly on regulations.
If this your contention, then you immediately want to stop all coal and oil plants pending regulatory overhaul. Coal plants release 100x more radioactive material than any other source in the world.
And that's not even to mention the operating dangers, from poor work environments to accidents. And that's not even mentioning the environmental disasters. Fossil fuel accidents have routinely devastated entire ecosystems, from Exxon Valdez to Deepwater Horizon.
Nuclear power has the 'airplane safety' problem, people are terrified of air travel despite repeatedly being proven to be the safest form of transportation. The same is true for nuclear power. It is by far and away the safest form of energy generation, with the common myths repeatedly debunked time after time.
If this your contention, then you immediately want to stop all coal and oil plants pending regulatory overhaul.
You have a rather large flaw in your logic.
The statement that you are quoting is directly supported by the data in my link. Fatality rates in the US are generally an order of magnitude lower than in the rest of the world, because of US regulations. This is a statement of fact, and not an argument for any random regulations that you just thought up.
On your statement about radioactivity, coal plants distribute more radioactive material than nuclear, but nuclear produces more nasty waste per gigawatt than coal. So far nuclear has been astoundingly safe, but the eventual damage from nuclear depends on our ability to safely store that waste for longer than human history.
Does nuclear actually produce more nasty waste waste, or does it merely produce more local waste? Coal produces a huge amount of nasty waste, but the disposal problem is "solved" for much of it by just venting it into the atmosphere to go wherever it will.
What really brings it home for me are the warnings to limit seafood consumption for pregnant women, children, and other vulnerable populations due to mercury contamination. About half of that contamination comes from coal power. Coal is so dirty that it has made an entire type of food dangerous to consume!
Do you have magical pixies to transport the nuclear material there that can ensure it won't be stolen in transit? Can you create a secure facility in one of the most hostile climates in the world? If not, that will never work.
(Shrug) We've been hauling not only fissionable materials, but entire working reactors around the oceans for decades with an excellent safety record. So far no one has tried to steal fissionable materials from the US Navy, but I suppose anything is possible in a world going crazier by the day.
The costs of creating and staffing a secure storage facility would not be trivial, but then, nothing else about energy production is.
The main concern with facilities like WIPP isn't so much security against dedicated assaults, but keeping future subliterate humans from stumbling across the material for the next 10,000 years or so. Antarctica solves that problem nicely. No one who isn't equipped to deal with hazardous technology is ever going to visit Antarctica.
The suggestion doesn't seem so obviously ridiculous that it should be dismissed that easily. Bear in mind that the total quantity of material we're talking about is relatively small: a few thousand tons a year, which is far less than the capacity of a single typical container ship.
The economic value of nuclear waste is basically zero, so you only really have to worry about theft for purposes like terrorism. And even if somebody does break into your secure facility, it's hard to imagine an easy way for them to get significant amounts of material out. Seems to me that you wouldn't have to try very hard to make a storage facility more secure than the nuclear plants themselves. Probably the biggest obstacles would be political, not technical.
> ...so you only really have to worry about theft for purposes like terrorism.
That's a pretty big worry. This stuff is super dirty and in the wrong hands could cause a lot of problems. Unlike a pressure cooker bomb which either kills you, maims you, or doesn't do anything to you, a radioactive bomb might kill you anywhere from now to twenty years from now and everyone exposed to it will be left wondering when their number comes up.
The smarter thing is to come up with better ways of reburning the fuel and storing it long-term on-site at the reactor which is already a secure facility. The total amount is small. They don't need tons of space to deal with it. The less you move this stuff around the better.
The risks there are more Fukishima in nature where if they lose power (at a power plant!) then they need some mechanism to circulate water in the cooling tanks to prevent a boil-off.
> a radioactive bomb might kill you anywhere from now to twenty years from now and everyone exposed to it will be left wondering when their number comes up.
I feel obligated to point out that this also applies to things like lead paint, mercury (got any CFL bulbs?), red meat, burnt toast, gasoline vapors, asbestos, new car smell, and sunlight.
Nuclear waste is dangerous, but not outrageously so. It's treated with a deference far beyond what's given to other stuff that kills us regularly.
The jury is still out on which will kill more in the end. Though so far nuclear is looking really, really good.
See https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2012/06/10/energys-d... for some statistics on how dangerous things are so far.