Unifying Contradiction

Of course the point is not that you should believe something just because Spider Robinson says so, but that you should agree that the response in tHHoNGN is rather small compared to the vituperation on the part of the anti-nukes, and, I urge, agree that it is justified.
No doubt one of the items that you thought talked down to you was the graphic depicition of the risks of coal, showing a large paragraph or two of crosses to represent the deaths from that, while showing a tiny dot to depict the deaths from nuclear power "For those who can't do simple arithmetic, there are visual aids" (-Spider). I think this just shows a good deal of frustration on the part of the pro-nuke side, since the anti-nukes are notoriously lacking in a sense of perspective. They hear that there is a risk, and they start screaming about it without stopping to think about magnitudes, compare risks, or consider the risk of "no risk". If you didn't read all the way through the book (THHoNgN), you might have missed the explanation that "a sense of perspective is what this book is about." I gave a class presentation about deep space communications, and one of my fellow engineering students actually put up his hand and asked if the few watts of energy in which the Earth is bathed by transmissions back from space probes might harm the environment. In retrospect, I wanted to tell the class that as engineers, one of our roles to the public should be to educate them about the meaning of orders of magnitude.
Another depiction of this frustration was depicted in "Star Trek the Next Generation", when Dr. Crusher protests to the Captain that the tiny risk represented by the sickness carried by a patient in sickbay did not merit killing the sick person in order to protect the guardian's charge -- this was the episode in which Wesley meets a shape-changing girl.
There's a good deal of cutting humor in THHoNgN, as you may have noticed; you shouldn't take it personally, but rather see it as directed against the irrational.