>...That would be a really powerful argument for nuclear if people didn't already know that.

Yes some people know that, but obviously many people don't or politicians wouldn't shut down all their nuclear power plants while continuing to run coal. Burning coal when there are alternatives is a danger not just to the thousands who will die that year, but to future generations who have to deal with the CO2.

>...How about running the numbers for nuclear plus as much natural gas as necessary to follow load, vs renewables plus natural gas? That seems like the real question. (Numbers here being cost, time, C02, health impacts, deaths etc. because deaths are acceptable if we could have saved enough money to save many more lives elsewhere).

Solar/wind have such low capacity factors that without grid storage at best they can be used as a supplement to a load following base load power source. The people who are afraid of nuclear power suggest to use natural gas as the base load. The CO2 from burning natural gas is less than coal and it doesn't emit mercury or the other particulates and doesn't have a waste issue like coal does. Unfortunately for those who care about climate change, there are inevitable methane releases from fracking and from distribution of natural gas and those are now known to be worse than previously thought:

>...Back in August, a NOAA-led study measured a stunning 6% to 12% methane leakage over one of the country’s largest gas fields — which would gut the climate benefits of switching from coal to gas.
We’ve known for a long time that methane is a far more potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide (CO2), which is released when any hydrocarbon, like natural gas, is burned.
But the IPCC’s latest report, released Monday (big PDF here), reports that methane is 34 times stronger a heat-trapping gas than CO2 over a 100-year time scale, so its global-warming potential (GWP) is 34. That is a nearly 40% increase from the IPCC’s previous estimate of 25.

https://thinkprogress.org/more-bad-news-for-fracking-ipcc-wa...

The death rate from natural gas accidents is also much higher than from nuclear energy. There is no defense in depth or a slow progression of accident - one unexpected spark and natural gas is an explosive.

In the San Bruno natural gas explosion 8 members of the general public died and eyewitnesses reported the initial blast "had a wall of fire more than 1,000 feet high". Can you imagine the media coverage if this had been a nuclear accident?? Just because the media finds such stories uninteresting, doesn't mean we should ignore these deaths - that was 8 more people that died in Fukushima. No one can claim that natural gas is safer than nuclear power and unfortunately using natural gas may be as bad for the climate as burning coal.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Bruno_pipeline_explosion

From a previous comment someone made, here are the death totals for generating power:

Energy Source Mortality Rate (deaths/trillionkWhr)

Coal – U.S. 10,000 (32% U.S. electricity)

Natural Gas 4,000 (22% global electricity)

Solar (rooftop) 440 (< 1% global electricity)

Wind 150 (2% global electricity)

Nuclear – U.S. 0.1 (19% U.S. electricity)

While the death rate for solar farms should be much less than rooftop and the price of solar cells continues to drop, the costs for land do not:

>...To build the equivalent of a 1,000-Mw nuclear plant, a solar park would require 11,000
acres of PV solar panels and a wind farm would need 50,000 acres of wind turbines. By contrast, Diablo Canyon is able to produce twice as much power (2300 Mw) in a footprint of approximately 545 acres.

https://www.pge.com/includes/docs/pdfs/shared/edusafety/syst...

The usual response I have heard is to say that we should put all the solar farms in the southwest and rebuild our grid system to handle have the power source thousands of miles away. Unclear how many billions of dollars this would cost (and how feasible this could ever be and the terrorist potential of having so many people dependent on such long distance power lines) but this cost should be added to the cost of solar if this is what people think should be done.

And as far as using natural gas to be the base load for solar/wind, nuclear in France is load following, there isn't a reason it can't be in other places.