There are a lot of coal plants that constantly emit a lot of waste into the atmosphere. Nuclear events are, thankfully, quite rare and have been largely contained.
Plus, as bad as radioactive incidents can be, they don't affect the climate. Once the radiation dies down or is mitigated through clean-up efforts there will be no lasting impact on the world. In other words, with the right insurance policy you can recover from a disaster.
Hiroshima and Nagasakia were both deliberately targeted by nuclear weapons and are still inhabited. Cleaning up the mess can be expensive, but it's not impossible.
Cleaning up the mess made by a coal plant is basically impossible, the effects are too far reaching.
There's a huge difference between cleaning up the surrounding landscape and dealing with the broken reactors themselves. Eventually we'll figure out how to fix those. Nothing an X-Prize contest or two can't help address if things get truly desperate.
I'd take a contaminated room any day over a whole planet slowly cooking itself to death.
We have a number of commercial space-flight companies now and a dozen self-driving car platforms that work quite well. Neither of these really existed before their respective X-Prize type challenges.
Plus, as bad as radioactive incidents can be, they don't affect the climate. Once the radiation dies down or is mitigated through clean-up efforts there will be no lasting impact on the world. In other words, with the right insurance policy you can recover from a disaster.
Hiroshima and Nagasakia were both deliberately targeted by nuclear weapons and are still inhabited. Cleaning up the mess can be expensive, but it's not impossible.
Cleaning up the mess made by a coal plant is basically impossible, the effects are too far reaching.