cricketo said:
Again, there is a difference. Coal delivery is an integral part of a coal fired power plant. Without coal delivery a plant can't function. Solar obviously doesn't have such pre-requisite.
You can't have solar power systems without panel (or mirror) deliveries. So it's a similiar issue.
Look, I know you want to make solar out to be better in every way than nuclear. Solar is super safe, so no problems there. But nuclear is even safer. Here in the US, for example, there have been nine fatalities from operating commercial nuclear power plants. None were related to the reactor; they were all things like being electrocuted after falling down a manhole, having a crane drop a turbine part on someone, drowning when a feedwater pipe breaks etc. There are about 50 fall deaths every year related to solar power. They don't break them out any more than that, so we don't know which were during installation and which were due to cleaning or routine maintenance.
In both cases the numbers are very close to zero. Solar will always be a bit more dangerous than nuclear for those "mundane" accidents just because the power density is so much lower. For a 4 gigawatt nuclear power plant you might have a crew of 60 per shift, always ready to fall out a window or smush themselves in a trash compactor or something. And that seems like a lot - but that's 60 people that end up maintaining something that is providing ~100 gigawatt-hours a day. To get the same amount of daily power from solar is going to take a lot more than 60 people maintaining and cleaning the power plants.
But it's pretty meaningless because both are effectively zero compared to coal. And solar provides peaking power and a lot of energy - nuclear provides baseload power that you can't really throttle (so they are terrible peakers.) They complement each other.
The reason nuclear isn't more popular isn't the actual safety issues. It is:
1) People are afraid of them because they don't understand them, and radiation is a scary word.
2) Nuclear power is expensive, even with subsidies.
It would be great to get all our power from solar, wind and hydro. We are a long way from that. In the short term we are going to need baseload power. And for every nuclear plant you open/every coal plant you shut down, you save the lives of hundreds of people a year. Right now that's not factored into any costs, so coal is generally seen as cheaper than nuclear. And that's unfortunate because it will result in a lot more dead people.