However, that's not how people think. Single events where lots of people die are much more interesting than multiple events. Furthermore, events where the victims were not in control of the situation are also interesting.

This is what causes people to get upset when a hundred people die in a single airplane accident, or a single building bombing, or a single chemical plant explosion. It doesn't matter that coal kills more people than nuclear energy, what matters is that the coal deaths happen one at a time spread out across the world, and the miners could have not gone into that line of work.