Re: even more safer to operate?
Windscale - Vast, vast majority of the contamination is long gone as a multitude of half-lives have passed. What remains has likely little to no long term impacts. Also another design that should have never been built had there been proper knowledge sharing, but the yanks didn't want to share their secrets with the brits who had to find out about Wigner energy on their own. The problems and dangers of the design were well understood in the US but that knowledge hadn't reached the British nuclear energy sector yet. The high mark of estimated deaths as a result of the incident is roughly 200 people. Certainly not trivial, but that's assuming an LNT model and is likely a large over exaggeration. Conclusions from subsequent research "A study of workers directly involved in the cleanup—and thus expected to have seen the highest exposure rates—found no significant long-term health effects from their involvement." seems to support this.
Three Mile Island - Lots of lessons learned from this incident and an accident like it occuring again in a modern reactor is slim to none. The incident released relatively little materials and left no significant long term contamination in the surrounding area. Current reporting afaik states no additional radiogenic cancers are expected in the general populace.
Fukushima - See also my earlier post. The absolute worst accident that can happen in a modern nuclear plant and the after effects in terms of nuclear contamination seems to be relatively mild. Certainly they'll pale in comparison to the loss of life and destruction from the earthquake and tsunami that precipitated the events at the power plant. It's had a far bigger impact than it needed to have due to extremely strict (to downright paranoid) contamination limits, an unnecessary large scale evacuation and rampant nucleo-/radio-phobia.
In conclusion, yes, I'd rather live within 5 km of a nuclear plant than within 5 km of a coal, LNG or wind power plant.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
