No meltdowns impact.

In other words, the main lesson that should be drawn from the worst nuclear accidents is that nuclear energy has always been inherently safe.

The truth about nuclear power’s safety is so shocking that it’s worth taking a closer look at the worst accidents, starting with the worst of the worst: Chernobyl.

The nuclear plant is in Ukraine which, in 1986, the year of the accident, was a Soviet Republic. Operators lost control of an unauthorized experiment that resulted in the reactor catching fire.

There was no containment dome, and the fire spewed out radioactive particulate matter, which went all over the world, leading many to conclude that Chernobyl is not just the worst nuclear accident in history but is also the worst nuclear accident possible.

Twenty-eight firefighters died after putting out the Chernobyl fire. While the death of any firefighter is tragic, it’s worth putting that number in perspective. Eighty-six firefighters died in the U.S. in 2018, and 343 firefighters died during the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks.

Since the Chernobyl accident, 19 first responders have died, according to the United Nations, for ”various reasons” including tuberculosis, cirrhosis of the liver, heart attacks, and trauma. The U.N. concluded that “the assignment of radiation as the cause of death has become less clear.”

What about cancer? By 2065 there may be 16,000 thyroid cancers; to date there have been 6,000. Since thyroid cancer has a mortality rate of just one percent — it is an easy cancer to treat — expected deaths may be 160.

The World Health Organization claims on its web site that Chernobyl could result in the premature deaths of 4,000 people, but according to Dr. Geraldine Thomas, who started and runs the Chernobyl Tissue Bank, that number is based on a disproven methodology.

“That WHO number is based on LNT,” she explained, using the acronym for the “linear no-threshold” method of extrapolating deaths from radiation.

LNT assumes that there is no threshold below which radiation is safe, but that assumption has been discredited over recent decades by multiple sources of data.

Support for the idea that radiation is harmless at low levels comes from the fact that people who live in places with higher background radiation, like Colorado, do not suffer elevated rates of cancer.

In fact, residents of Colorado, where radiation is higher because of high concentrations of uranium in the ground, enjoy some of the lowest cancer rates in the U.S.

Even relatively high doses of radiation cause far less harm than most people think. Careful, large, and long-term studies of survivors of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki offer compelling demonstration.

Cancer rates were just 10 percent higher among atomic blast survivors, most of whom never got cancer. Even those who received a dose 1,000 times higher than today’s safety limit saw their lives cut short by an average of 16 months.

But didn’t the Japanese government recently award a financial settlement to the family of a Fukushima worker who claimed his cancer was from the accident?

It did, but for reasons that were clearly political, and having to do with the Japanese government’s consensus-based, conflict-averse style, as well as lingering guilt felt by elite policymakers toward Fukushima workers and residents, who felt doubly aggrieved by the tsunami and meltdowns.

The worker’s cancer was highly unlikely to have come from Fukushima because, once again, the level of radiation workers received was far lower than the ones received by the Hiroshima/Nagasaki cohort that saw (modestly) higher cancer rates.

What about Three Mile Island? After the accident in 1979, Time Magazine ran a cover story that superimposed a glowing headline, “Nuclear Nightmare,” over an image of the plant. Nightmare? More like a dream. What other major industrial technology can suffer a catastrophic failure and not kill anyone?

Remember when the Deepwater Horizon oil drilling rig caught on fire and killed 11 people? Four months later, a Pacific Gas & Electric natural gas pipeline exploded just south of San Francisco and killed eight people sleeping in their beds. And that was just one year, 2010.

The worst energy accident of all time was the 1975 collapse of the Banqiao hydroelectric dam in China. It collapsed and killed between 170,000 and 230,000 people.

Nuclear’s worst accidents show that the technology has always been safe for the same, inherent reason that it has always had such a small environmental impact: the high energy density of its fuel.

Splitting atoms to create heat, rather than than splitting chemical bonds through fire, requires tiny amounts of fuel. A single Coke can of uranium can provide enough energy for an entire high-energy life.

When the worst occurs, and the fuel melts, the amount of particulate matter that escapes from the plant is insignificant in contrast to both the fiery explosions of fossil fuels and the daily emission of particulate matter from fossil- and biomass-burning homes, cars, and power plants, which kill seven million people a year.

It's not that nuclear energy never kills. It's that nuclear's death toll is vanishingly small. Consider nuclear's global death toll in context. These are just annual deaths.

- walking: 270,000

- driving: 1,350,000

- working: 2,300,000

- air pollution: 4,200,000

By contrast, nuclear's death total is likely to be around 200.