Compared to fossil fuels?
Fossil fuels are not harmless. Petrol, for example, contains a few percent benzene, a dangerous and lifetime-cumulative carcinogen. Every time you catch a whiff of petrol at a filling station, that's a little more benzene causing transcription errors in your DNA for the rest of your life. That ultrafine-particle soot coming out of a diesel is little better. Coal is full of polycyclic aromatics and tars, not unlike that which a cigarette smoker inhales. And when oil refineries encounter an earthquake or other serious accident, carcinogenic combustion products are vented to the atmosphere in uncounted tons.
That's without mentioning global warming.
You probably know of someone who died of anthropogenic cancer. You can't tell if it was induced by the oil industry, atomic bomb testing, Chernobyl, some other human activity, or natural causes. Cancer rates are increasing, but that's to be expected, as other fatal illnesses become curable and the population ages. Nevertheless, some part of that increase must reflect the poisons that we are putting into our ecosphere.
Life cannot ever be risk-free. The risk attached to using oil products seems acceptable (ignoring global warming). Nuclear power? I feel this article is very premature - let's see what it looks like a year from now. And let's make damn sure that any future nuclear plants are *intrinsically* safe. If anything knocks out the power grid and all the backup systems, I want to know that the reactors can just sit there for the next few months without exploding or catching fire. Which this deply flawed 1960s design couldn't, and hasn't. Nowhere on the planet is earthquake-proof (witness New Madrid). They're just much less likely in the UK than in Japan. Ditto tsunamis.
Occasionally poisoning many square miles with radiation for decades or centuries to come isn't acceptable to me. Although there again, if you find out what the levels of chemical contaminants are like near the site of a Victorian municipal coal gas works or ironworks ... someone who did that today would be jailed.