Written by the president of an openly pro-nuclear organization. Do you really think reading propaganda is the way to get a balanced viewpoint?
Dismissing anything as "propaganda" gets us nowhere.
For what it's worth, I smelled what's up right when he talked about chernobyl right below the The Shocking Truth subheadline. The way the deaths are calculated is highly disputed, and he does not reflect that properly, instead presenting the pro-nuclear viewpoint as truth.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19927377 links an article that covers that in a way more balanced way.
I (temporarily) removed it because I claimed the referenced article only talked about cancer death rates instead of cancer rates. That was a mistake on my part.
It's too black and white to see a controversial debate in "true" vs "false" statements. I mean "vaccines may have serious side effects" is not a false statement, however if it's the only statement it omits other also true statements such as "measles may cause serious complications" and the numbers / statistics comparing the two.
The argument is that the disasters typically demonstrate that even when things go horribly wrong nuclear is still better than business as usual (once considered in an appropariate global context). Business as usual is basically a disaster every year, when compared to nuclear.
The economic costs of mining coal/petroleum alone are catastrophic if there was a way to avoid it (eg, by mining uranium instead, which requires a fraction of the effort). Extraction is a huge waste of time and resources assuming that there is a way to avoid doing it. All the personpower and capital could be deployed to doing other things if it wasn't being used to dig big holes.
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.
It links to https://coloradosun.com/2019/02/04/colorado-skin-cancer-rate... titled Colorado has the highest per-capita rate of skin cancer, thanks to sunshine and high elevation, which does not mention Uranium at all. The article does mention a low percentage of people diagnosed with cancer, and a death rate declining faster than average. However, this gets attributed to factors like low obesity and smoking rates and above-average health care coverage. If that's accurate, the article doesn't really allow us to come to any conclusions regarding background radiation effects on cancer rates except that they are less impactful than smoking...
The source is saying that they have one of the lowest cancer rates and that the effects are all non-radiation based.
Shellenberger didn't provide a reference for Colorado having high background rates - but it does seem to be correct [0].
[0] mtnweekly.com/mountain-lifestyle/health/radiation-levels-in-colorado-highest-in-world
By reading these two sources I can get both sides of the story and see the arguments for and against.
This is how debates usually work.
A tangent, but this mindset of "there are always two valid sides at the extremes and we need to present both" is said to be a huge burden on the reporting about politics in the US, it makes the most extreme viewpoints visible and supported the rise of the fascists in the GOP. I agree.