Disclaimer: The information below is taken from the work of Michael Shellenberger, American environmental activist, founder of the "Environmental Progress" association. In 2008, he was part of “Heroes of the Environment” by TIMES magazine. Michael will be in Belgium next September!

In 2008, former NASA scientists James Hansen and Pushker Karecha, who are dedicated to climate defense, estimated that the production of electrical energy by nuclear power plants in operation around the world since the early 1970s , has prevented 1.84 million deaths that would have occurred if the same amount of electrical energy had resulted from the use of fossil fuels (coal, gas, oil) due to air pollution that would have resulted! As a reference, the number of people who die annually in the world from the consequences of air pollution from all causes is 7 million people and black electricity alone in Germany kills 200,000 people per year!

Being in 2021, it is reasonable to consider that, since the use of nuclear energy to produce electricity, the lives saved by non-pollution of the air (excluding radioactivity) therefore now largely exceed 2 million lives. This figure is to be put in front of the deaths attributed to "nuclear accidents" (in fact only Chernobyl - 1988- since there were no deaths at Three Miles Island, only a few rare in Fukushima, most of which victims come from the tsunami and, by the way, no fatal nuclear accident in Belgium since the operation of nuclear power plants). It should be noted that the neutral organizations WHO, UNSCEAR, IAEA, FAO estimate that 4,000 deaths were caused by the Chernobyl accident. For comparison, the global casualties of civil aviation activity have averaged over the past 20 years just over 1,000 people per year! We are obviously not talking about the number of those linked to the mobility of cars, motorcycles and bicycles!