If an accident is reported the outcry is much more vocal when it's a nuke accident than if it's a burning oil dump.
Therefore profits will be hit, and a plant may be closed down. Therefore - since it's mostly about profit - it's better to minimise the truth than be honest.
I think De's point is that a key difference is that it's impossible for people to assess the risk for themselves, which means that nuke damage assessment relies on expert testimony more than any other industry does.
When something like Bhopal happens it's obvious who has been affected. With coal burning you'll see smog and acid rain. But an equivalent nuke accident will release deadly poisons into the air and no one will notice unless some bothers to tell them.
So it's a combination of the profit motive, legacy links to weapons development, the opaqueness of the process itself and - not least - the solid record of dishonesty that the industry has acquired over the years.
This doesn't mean the industry has to be dishonest. But it's very much harder to cover up a loose turbine blade than a leak of radioactive particles.
Well, burning oil dumps, just like uranium mine pollution, more often happen in places like Nigeria, which may incite some locals to form terrorist resistance movements, while we ignore it. (Tho' in Texas, the oil industry managed to cloak its environmental destruction in secrecy during Bush's governorship.) *Lunatic*, n. One whose delusions are out of fashion.
