caused the cordoning off of a vast area of land, displaced many without a likely chance in their lifetimes of returning to their homes? Thats right I don't remember anything that has done that.

I just don't see a happy ending to this at all.

Fossil fuel use causes deaths from routine use at a level high enough that Hansen et al estimate that the electricity generation from fossil fuels equivalent to the electricity generated historically by nuclear results in 1.8 million deaths worldwide. (Their claim that nuclear therefore "saved" 1.8 million lives is considerably more problematic; their figure is more accurately an estimate of the fossil fuel death toll, given the assumption that nuclear displaced fossil fuels directly and the both the low number they use for Chernobyl deaths and the substantial uncertainty associated with realistic estimates.)

I think what's unique with nuclear is that the threshold for evacuating people is different relative to the risks. If we evacuated people from areas where the elevated death risk from exposure to fossil fuel pollution were comparable to the elevated risk from nuclear contamination, we'd probably have to shut down most cities.

As extraction methods for fossil fuels become more extreme, the "livability" of increasingly large regions will also degrade. Fracking and mountaintop removal mining pose real threats to water supplies, and I don't imagine the tar sand regions will be very good places to live after squeezing out the petroleum.

The prospect of potentially losing many square miles to nuclear accidents every N reactor years may be the best way to estimate the downside of serious reactor accidents. No matter how one tweaks the numbers, fatalities per TWh generated can't really capture the harm associated with loss of land. But how to weigh that against the risks of other ways of harnessing energy depends a lot on which alternatives are in play; it may be a unique feature of INES 7 accidents, but there are similar drawbacks to other energy technologies. Even deploying large-scale solar involves making decisions about land use that can disrupt ecosystems on a many-square-miles scale (though obviously a considered decision to build such an array, with opportunities to assess environmental impacts in advance and the potential to remove the hardware easily, is very different from unplanned and uncontrolled release of radioactive materials with half-lives measured in decades!).