Despite the current fires, wildfires are down and have been for decades. A lot of the current wild fires stem from reducing the number of controlled burns we use to do.
Also there is quite a significant amount of arson:
https://archive.is/GWLYq, https://archive.is/cFPbd, https://archive.is/xHiFO, https://archive.is/mhKtG, https://archive.is/US23e, https://archive.is/JyfJe, https://archive.is/owMeD, https://archive.is/rl2cm (and there are a ton more)
14 of the 20 worst wildfires have occurred in the past 15 years, and the size of fire season is growing.
https://laist.com/2019/10/28/california-fires-explained-why-...
The west coast has had catastrophic human intervention in the natural fire cycle, piling up fuel year after year until it was too big of a hazard for humans to handle. https://www.wsj.com/articles/californias-paradise-lost-15420...
Tsunamis, by themselves, don't contaminate ocean-water with radioactive material to a density high enough to create a 10-km no-fish-zone. https://www.nippon.com/en/japan-data/h00664/fukushima-fishin...
And while Chernobyl didn't happen in the past 20 years, I think it's naive to consider nuclear power safe when a continent-threatening disaster occurred in the past 40 years. "One massive disaster per generation" makes people justifiably leery. Personally, I think the grand calculus may tilt slightly in nuclear's favor over fossil fuels, but the risk can't be swept under the rug.
> The west coast has had catastrophic human intervention in the natural fire cycle, piling up fuel year after year until it was too big of a hazard for humans to handle
This is a concern, but I think we shouldn't discount that the hottest years recorded in California history of record-keeping have been, with only a couple exceptions, the most recent years (https://www.climatesignals.org/sites/default/files/resources...). The "natural" fire cycle will get further and further from its historical nature as ambient temperatures climb and rainfall diminishes.
OK, fair enough, I think it may be a good idea not to build nuclear reactors in potential direct paths of tsunamis, or at least not on the seashore <20 meters above sea level, when there’s a local fishing industry, to minimize economic risk. But if the fact that the most powerful earthquake ever recorded in Japan, the fourth most powerful earthquake in the recorded history of the world, causing the only nuclear “disaster” to share the same maximum classification as Chernobyl, killed at maximum one person singular, a thousand times less than an average year of rooftop solar https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2008/03/deaths-per-twh-for-all... § The safety issues with Rooftop solar installations / http://www.osha.gov/Publications/Construction_Fatalities/Con..., “raise[s] serious questions about the safety of nuclear power,” I don’t know an appropriate adjective to describe the questions raised by one form of solar killing 3 orders of magnitude more yearly.
(Edit: On fires)
Heat may exacerbate fires, but it doesn’t change the fact that you can’t burn what isn’t there, and there simply wouldn’t be anywhere near as much flammable undergrowth, etc. if firefighters didn’t fight to prevent nature from removing it in smaller, safer quantities. The number of deaths from natural disasters relative to population is decreasing and there’s no reason for the west coast to be an exception (other than blaming the weather and ignoring inconvenient facts and logic).
Slightly?
No one except the Soviet Union said the Chernobyl style plants were reasonable designs. That kind of design would have been illegal to build anywhere else in the world.
The death rate from Fukishima is far less than the death rate from any properly working fossil fuels source (or wind or rooftop solar for that matter). One estimate is that worldwide use of coal causes up to 800,000 deaths a year - this is much worse than all deaths from nuclear, including the bombs that were dropped on Japan!
A NASA estimate is that the use of nuclear power has saved approximately 1.8 million lives in the years 1971-2009:
https://www.giss.nasa.gov/research/briefs/kharecha_02/
No one ever promised that there would never be a nuclear accident - that would be unrealistic for any power source. But historically nuclear power has been safer than all the alternatives that were available.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/494425/death-rate-worldw...
https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy
https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2011/03/deaths-per-twh-by-ener...
https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2012/06/10/energys-d...
Unfortunately anything at all related to nuclear is covered by the media orders of magnitude more than other power sources so many people have an understandable perception that it is much more dangerous than other sources of power. 200 thousand people had to be evacuated in CA a couple of years ago because of a lack of maintenance on a hydroelectric dam could've let to catastrophic failure. We got lucky that time as the rains stopped just in time, but how much did the media cover that story? How much would they have covered it if 200 thousand were evacuated because of a nuclear power plant?
It is possible there will be some major advances in grid storage that will allow us to stop using natural gas to cover for the intermittent nature of wind and solar. But what if that doesn't pan out? The dangers we are facing in the coming decades are immense. Is your fear of nuclear power so great that if you had to choose, you would prefer the world to suffer through catastrophic climate change rather than use nuclear power?
> And of course CO₂ danger is exaggerated, most scientists from the American Meteorological Society or the American Geophysical Union for the Statistical Assessment Service (STATS) don’t believe there will be catastrophic effects of global warming (including from more potent greenhouse gasses like methane) in the next 50-100 years.
Have they looked into what's going on in the west coast of the US right now?