Coal plants pose an even larger threat than mining, however: pollution. Coal plants emit soot, sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxides and other pollutants. These can cause smog and sicknesses like lung cancer. Last week, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency announced a proposed rule aimed at the coal industry that would limit emissions of mercury and other toxins from power plants. The rule would prevent “as many as 17,000 premature deaths and 11,000 heart attacks a year,” the agency said.

Such pollution estimates do not include the dangers associated with climate change, which is exacerbated by the carbon dioxide emissions from burning coal. Scientists warn that this could have a tremendous effect over the next century, including rising sea levels that could wreak havoc in countries like Bangladesh, where lots of people live in low-lying areas. One of nuclear power’s main advantages, of course, is that its reactors produce no carbon emissions.

Big nuclear accidents are rare, but their psychological effect is immense in terms of sowing fear in a broad population. “Radiation is something you can’t see, can’t smell, can’t taste,” said Dale Klein, a former chairman of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission who is now associate director of the Energy Institute at the University of Texas at Austin.

The terrifying results of atomic energy first appeared in the bombings at Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. Some Japanese survivors of those attacks have faced years of ostracism, as the news media reported last week. People who lived near Chernobyl, too, may grapple with a lifetime of worry, even if they have not gotten sick.

Movies like “Godzilla” — whose main character emerged from the site of atomic destruction — have fed fears of radiation, Mr. Klein said. “The China Syndrome,” starring Jane Fonda, about a TV reporter who stumbles upon malfeasance at a nuclear plant and persuades a whistle-blower to speak out about the potential for a meltdown that could “render an area the size of Pennsylvania permanently uninhabitable,” opened in March 1979. Twelve days later, America’s worst nuclear accident occurred at Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania, and the public was spooked.

For governments in need of new energy sources, the post-Fukushima public backlash against nuclear power, evident in Germany’s decision to shut its older reactors temporarily and in China’s slowdown in approvals for new plants, leaves an unpalatable choice. Concerns about climate change in theory will hamper a country’s ability to build more coal plants, though China, with its insatiable energy appetite, is building dozens each year. Coal and nuclear plants are important for the electric grid because both provide “baseload” power that is available day and night, and the plants can be built to a huge scale.

Coal is not the only choice, of course. In the United States, interest in natural gas is surging, after discoveries of rich shale supplies. Natural gas provided 24 percent of the country’s electric power last year, up from 19 percent in 2005. Coal provided 45 percent of U.S. electricity in 2010 and nuclear 20 percent.