First of all, this is obviously a joke, but in all seriousness there's more to nuclear accident than just the immediate danger it poses to people (which is, as you point out, very low).

My wife is a nuclear engineer (in France), and I'd have been the same hadn't Fukushima killed the job prospects in the field for almost a decade, so personally I would rather not have the “nuclear is too dangerous, let's kill this industry” once again.

Also, even if nuclear energy is very far from deadly in its day to day operations, nuclear accident have a lasting impact on the region near the plant, with people having to leave their houses and so on, so I'm not wishing that for anyone. (Living 8 km away from an nuclear plant makes me quite sensitive to this aspect, obviously).

> this is obviously a joke

Sorry. Even here, Poe's law is very much a thing when it comes to this topic.

> Living 8 km away from an nuclear plant makes me quite sensitive to this aspect, obviously

Living near a coal plant has a much bigger impact on your health, all things considered. We're just bad at estimating risk with things like this, especially with how media covers things.

The odds of a nuclear accident are far lower than most people believe, and the risks from coal far greater.

Again, you simply missed the joke. Let me sort it all out for you:

- fact #1: nuclear plants are way less dangerous than coal plants, because as long as there's no accident, it doesn't harm you (unlike coal) and odds of an accident are very very low.

- fact #2: when you are very unlucky and a nuclear accident do happen, then it's a big problem. Again, statistically it's not a concern because such accident are very very very rare: just 2.5 occurrences in 70 years of exploiting the technology over hundreds of nuclear reactors (I'm counting TMI as .5 here because it was close)

- now the joke explained: “Nuclear accidents happen when Italy start considering nuclear, which implies such an accident will occur soon”. If that correlation was indeed causation, there would be legit reasons to be afraid, because nuclear accident are still pretty bad when they happen. Obviously Italy doesn't possess such a power of triggering nuclear accident, and there's no reason to be afraid, but that was the joke!

The comment you're replying to is pretty clearly making a joke

Perhaps but it's also a common sentiment and also something that sways illogical voters. Both times mentioned by GP the referendums turned out against nuclear not because factual statistics about safety but because anti-nuclear activists were able to use those very public accidents to scare people.