It seems to me the reason for lack of new reactors in the UK is the vast expense that no one wants to underwrite, rather than regulation, seeing as everyone from the government to the public to the environmentalists seem to want them?
Yes, and the expense is very much due to the difficulties in meeting the UK regulators' safety expectations.
200 deaths from nuke power ever? Really? How many from Chernobyl alone? The workers, the miners, the liquidators, the military that were sent there, the Pripyat residents...
The hospital for radiation diseases in Kiev (opened in 86 specifically for Chernobyl victims) that has treated over a million people, I don’t know how many of them lived...?
200 directly attributable to radiation (again, from memory). 30-odd of those happened during or immediately after Chernobyl.
I understand that there was sort of a reverse placebo effect after the accident, where if anyone in the area became ill it was immediately attributed to Chernobyl fallout (whether or not this was likely to be true). Add in the possibility of compensation and there is the potential for the indirect effects of radiation exposure in the local populace to be overestimated.
That said, it's certain that many may have had their lives shortened through long-term stochastic effects in the years since the accident - but we just can't reliably come up with a number. (If you get cancer, you can't be sure it was because of increased exposure to radiation, or you were going to get it anyway - unless it's something obvious like the thyroid). The effects of very low levels of exposure just aren't understood well.
I just quickly googled it and estimates seem to range from a few thousand up to 60,000 deaths in the long term from Chernobyl, which reflects this difficulty. Note that in the same period, hundreds of millions of people will die/ will have died from 'natural' cancer - so we are looking for needles in haystacks.
No-one died directly from acute radiation effects during the Fukushima accident, and estimates put the long-term impact in the 10s to low 1000s. Again, put it in perspective: 20,000 died almost instantly in the Tsunami.
So lets take the worst case estimates and pessimistically round them up to 100,000 to be sue. So, if we say that 100,000 have died or will potentially have their lives shortened* or as a result of nuclear power generation over the last 60 years, it is still, by orders of magnitude, the safest bulk power source available.
*noting you can just as easily die of something else before the radiation-induced cancer might have got you!
I can't find it now but I once read a study that calculated deaths per kwh of power generated. The most deadly? Solar power. Generates hardly any power, and it only takes one or two fitters to fall off a roof and the ratio becomes terrible.
I'll get off my high horse now! Back on topic: I'm planning on watching the first episode tonight. I've studied Chernobyl repeatedly over the years so I'm really interested to see it - though I understand it's entertainment, and not a documentary, so I suspect facts will have been altered for dramatic effect.