[IROC]

I worked in a nuclear plant for years. While I will say that nothing is 100% safe as long as human error is a factor, today's nuclear plants have many layers of safety designed to even mitigate the human error part. I'm pretty familiar with how a nuclear plant and it's safety systems work (at least a BWR) and I'd be hard pressed to come up with a realistic accident scenario that actually threatened the populace.

I read something once (a long time ago, so forgive me if the numbers aren't exactly right), but if one compares a nuclear plant and a coal-fired plant of the same output capacity (1000 MW, I believe it was), it would take approximately 1 ton of uranium fuel to operate the nuclear plant for one year. It would take 89 one-hundred ton coal cars PER DAY to operate the coal plant for the same period of time. Kinda puts it in perspective.