Well, if you want to take that attitude every engineering decision is gambling then. In every project at some point you have to draw the line somewhere and weigh safety against cost. For example, people building a skyscraper don't design them to withstand 10.0 earthquakes and 500MPH wind gusts. Would a building designed to withstand a 10.0 earthquake and 500MPH wind gusts be safer? sure. Would it cost more? absolutely. But is it necessary? Well, there's that dreaded gamble again.
Why the rolling of eyes? That's EXACTLY what engineering decisions are all about - doesn't matter if you are speccing up a beam to support the roof of your outback dunny or designing a space shuttle - in the end, you have to decide where you want to draw the line between cost and safety.
The thing with nuclear is that we usually do some sort of informal calculus of results vs chances, and we humans tend to weight really catastrophic results pretty heavily. In other words, we don't generally accept a simple linear calculation. We don't believe that a 50% chance of one death is the same overall risk as a 1% chance of 50 deaths. (You can argue whether this is morally right or wrong, and I'd probably agree with you if you did, but that's not the point - the point is that people generally think that the 1% chance of 50 deaths is more important, and make decisions accordingly. This is one reason why nuclear power is so horribly expensive - it doesn't often kill people, but when it does, it kills a whole bucket load of them.
So you can argue yourself blue in the face about the number of people killed falling down ladders in coal mines every year and point out that coal kills more than nuclear, but you will never achieve a result doing that, because people don't look at risk that way.
As an example, consider the idiotic national panic that gripped the USA after 911 and still hasn't entirely died down. The reality is that more Americans die in road accidents every month than died as a result of that famous attack .... but that's a small, regular death toll (like coal-related deaths) that doesn't change much from day to day and doesn't grab the imagination. Result: America pissed billions of dollars up against the wall and started at least two wars and got thousands of its own young uniformed citizens killed .... and all to respond to an unlikely risk. If the US had spent that amount of money and effort on road safety, the net saving in lives would be many thousands. Indeed, one tenth of that money would have been plenty. (Or, if you don't care about road safety, spend the money on domestic assults and murders, or on anti-smoking measures, or on healthy diets and obesity prevention .... they could have spent one tenth of the 911 money on any one of those steady but unspectacular killers, and got a vastly, almost incomparably better result. But because people pay more attention to large, unlikely single events than they do to smaller, more common, less unlikely events, the spending decisions are irrational
Net result: if you want to get people to agree to a generally safe facility that, if it ever does go wrong (which it hardly ever does), lays waste to vast areas and kills a lot of people all in one go .... you are up against it.
