If you're going to count a WHO estimate on lives shortened due to coal power in your fatality statistics, which the author does, it's probably not a good idea to dismiss the equivalent estimate of 4000 for Chernobyl, which the author also does. Even organizations existing to promote atomic energy aren't disputing the validity or relevance of that figure
I mean, if you're doing a sincere comparison with "people whose lives may have been shortened by coal dust" and "back of the envelope guesstimate how many people die installing domestic solar", you simply don't pick "people definitely proven to have died from radiation poisoning at Chernobyl" as your comparison point.
Coal would look remarkably safe (which it isn't) if you required similar standards of proof of coal dust rather than lifestyle factors being the cause of premature death.
While both the coal dust and Chernobyl future deaths are somewhat statistical in nature, there is a huge difference that you would acknowledge if you were sincere. The coal deaths are already occurring. They are, as far as I can tell, sufficiently statistically significant that they are not seriously in question.
The future Chernobyl deaths are just that: predictions about what may happen in the future. They think it could happen, but they don't know. And due to the extremely low level of the signal, it will be very hard to tell if they do occur, because as the WHO report states, other effects such as poverty are much more significant.
So, no, the comparison to coal dust is not unfair at all.
But, for the sake of argument, let's completely ignore the coal dust and other respiratory or global warming effects, and concentrate on just the proven accidents. Heck, let's be super unfair and leave in the estimated possible statistical future deaths from Chernobyl, but only consider the documented deaths from coal accidents. That gives us 4000 deaths for Chernobyl and 4000-6000 per year for coal. So even when being totally unfair towards nuclear, it is somewhere between 20-40x safer than coal.
When you level the playing field, you have the 50 deaths from Chernobyl and around 131 others, though that includes lots of accidents not related to power generation. Around 180. Let's double it and call it an even 400. So 10x fewer deaths than coal. Except that's per year vs. since ever. So we're talking around 500-1000x safer.
No matter how you slice and dice the numbers, nuclear power is vastly safer than existing means of power generation, even given the sorry state of the industry today.
Of course, we should still be doing as much solar as we can (just be careful when installing!), and we should improve reactor designs so they are even more safe. For example using the liquid fuel thorium reactors, or concepts such as PIUS, which uses passive mechanisms relying mostly on physical laws to shut down and cool the reactor, rather than active mechanisms that can fail as they did at Fukushima-Daiichi. And hope that one or more of the multitude of nuclear fusion projects makes a breakthrough.
> While both the coal dust and Chernobyl future deaths are somewhat statistical in nature, there is a huge difference that you would acknowledge if you were sincere.
OK then, I sincerely acknowledge that the estimate of 4000 Chernobyl casualties is much more widely accepted (including by the nuclear industry) than the WTO's more speculative guess at how many people are having their lifespan reduced by exposure to coal particle dust. I'm not sure why you would think otherwise, but then I'm also perplexed by your assumption that none of the 3940 total casualties the WHO predicts from increases in rates of cancer and leukaemia among those most closely exposed to Chernobyl radiation have happened yet.
The lack of confirmed Chernobyl deaths is because - as the report you linked to states - cancers are common cause of death among people not exposed to nuclear accidents, not because 50 acute radiation sickness victims and 9 kids with thyroid cancer are the only people living or working near Chernobyl to have died a bit young over the last 30 years. I mean, I'm not sure any individual lung cancer has been directly proven to be a result of working down a coal mine either, but it would be an unusually outspoken proponent of coal that argues that it should be discounted as a risk altogether because of that, or because of difficulties gauging the precise size of the effect when miners tend to be poor and smoke a lot.
I'm going to go out on a limb and consider a published study
suggesting nuclear is around 14 times safer than coal[1] and 1.5 times safer than natural gas a little more valid than your own back-of-the-envelope exercise, or indeed a blogger whose use of statistics is rather creative.
[1]though much as with flying being safer than driving, that's to a large extent because nobody is suicidal enough to run a nuclear plant with safety standards comparable to those of Chinese coal mines.
I mean, if you're doing a sincere comparison with "people whose lives may have been shortened by coal dust" and "back of the envelope guesstimate how many people die installing domestic solar", you simply don't pick "people definitely proven to have died from radiation poisoning at Chernobyl" as your comparison point.
Coal would look remarkably safe (which it isn't) if you required similar standards of proof of coal dust rather than lifestyle factors being the cause of premature death.