We all seem to get that airplanes are safe and that being afraid to fly is something to overcome. We also know how disastrously it can go wrong if the plane crashes into flats (I'm thinking of the Bijlmer disaster, not a terrorist attack): it's not a theoretical risk, it's just exceedingly unlikely to happen to you.
How come this is communicated differently for fission energy? Looking at the data it's a similar situation.
How many actual deaths are a result of nuke accidents?
Depending on how you count its possible more people died in a single airplane crashes than have died in all the nuke related energy production incidents, ever.
My father, who used to testify at various hearings (he was a physicist) used to make this argument. I think it kind of misses a key point: People would much rather deal with N deaths a year than deal with a range with an average of N - k, but a much, much higher possible number (thicker tail to the distribution).
Just because math says it's better doesn't mean that is how people experience the risk.
However, it doesn't capture all of it, because people vastly overestimate the risk of the bad case. Nuclear is dramatically safer than fossil fuels even if you only count the years with accidents.
https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy
And that's including the worst-case accidents.