Nuclear power is only as safe as the people who are involved in it. In this case, the Fukushima power plant wasn't funded like it should have been because people weren't interested in nuclear power. Turns out that's both extremely dangerous and hard to control.

Also, what do you mean by paranoia and unnecessary evacuations? Nobody could even guess what was going to happen. When will explosions happen? How many? What direction will the wind blow? The power plant was out of control. The US government didn't assist with evacuations until AFTER the first release which spread contamination south hitting Tokyo, and east hitting their own USS Ronald Reagan.

Paranoid? Unnecessary? Sorry, that's a cruel thing to say to those who were contaminated.

"That's how safe nuclear is."

> Paranoid? Unnecessary? Sorry, that's a cruel thing to say to those who were contaminated.

And it’s cruel to move thousands of people by force (and some of them died in the process). This is just an appeal to emotions, please don’t do that. There is already plenty to discuss about the effect of low-level radiation and risk assessments. Everybody is contaminated with radionuclides, there are numbers you can use to show that this specific contamination was more important than different background levels. Looking at those numbers show that the exclusion zone was vastly over-estimated.

> still didn't kill anyone

That's not a compelling argument, when the premise is misleading. While you (and others) split hairs over what "kill" means, people actually die from it.

https://ourworld.unu.edu/en/radiation-from-fukushima-disaste...

https://world.wng.org/2014/09/locals_suffer_long_term_effect...

This is pointless. Everything we do kills people. The choice we can make is between something that kills more and something that kills less, amongst other tradeoffs. Quantifying the number of deaths or cancers in this case tells you nothing relevant to make a decision or risk assessment: what are the costs of the alternatives?

The problem with pressurised water reactors is that failure is a very low probability but potentially very large consequences event. The advantage of fossil fuels (for public acceptance) is whilst the risk and the number of deaths are much higher (by a couple of orders of magnitude), the effects are spread out across space and time, and so are easy to ignore in our daily lives.

All this is a tragic misunderstanding of the situation we’re in. Ultimately, 100% renewables is a worthy goal. In the short to long term, shutting down nuclear power plants means burning fossil fuel. Climate is already spiralling out of control. The time to clean up our acts was 50 years ago, and now every decade we spend burning gas, oil, and coal is something we will pay dearly.

So yeah, nuclear is not ideal. It’s still part of the best strategy we have to produce clean energy.

> The choice we can make is between something that kills more and something that kills less, amongst other tradeoffs.

> Quantifying the number of deaths or cancers in this case tells you nothing relevant to make a decision or risk assessment

The two conflicting viewpoints posited in the same paragraph, seems ironic. The first is the issue, but requires veracity. The second is nonsensical. Humans make these decisions every day.

This is not contradictory. If you want to compare two solutions, you need to have a number for both. So in itself a number you assign to nuclear energy is useless (for the purpose of demonstrating that nuclear is either terrible or bad as an energy production source), unless you contrast it with the equivalent for the alternative.

Humans make a lot of stupid decisions rooted in gut feeling and prejudice all the time. A small subset of these decisions involve long-term industrial strategy at a national level or the life of millions of people. For these decisions we ought to do better.

If we scale up nuclear by 10 times, so that all power generation is handled by nuclear power plants, and we are extremely unlucky that we have 10 Fukushimas every year, and even if you count all the 1700 (non-radiation-related) death/Fukushima, we are still at 17,000 death/year, which is significantly lower than the number of death caused by fossil fuel power generation. (A quick Google search yielded 8.7 million/year).

Hell, even if you count all the people that have to evacuate for each Fukushima, we are still only at 4 million people moved/year vs. 8.7 million people death/year with fossil fuel power generation.

There are three more things to keep in mind:

1. I don't think we will have anywhere near 10 Fukushimas every year.

2. A lot of those stressed related death and evacuations are due to overly precautionary measures.

3. Death is much worse than having to relocate.

Yes, nuclear power generation does kill. However, the point is, it is significantly safer than fossil fuel.

If I am not mistaken, this is a massive under-estimation of the number of deaths related to fossil fuel, as I do not think it includes things like victims of freak weather events (droughts, hurricanes, heat waves) that are a consequence of burning fossil fuels. AFAIK the 8 million figure includes only deaths from direct pollution.

"Psychological effect" is not very convincing, especially since much of the psychological effect is due to paranoid over-zealous evacuations. Nuclear being blamed for the psychological problems caused by people (including officials in particular) being irrationally afraid of nuclear. People directly die from natural gas explosions or falling off roofs installing solar panels pretty regularly.

There was an actual tsunami that killed thousands of people directly. And worsened, slightly by climate change ocean level rise (by us refusing to decommission fossil fuel plants).

The US does not have a permanent storage solution for spent nuclear fuel and highly radioactive waste.

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yucca_Mountain_nuclear_waste_r...

The US has been using order-of-magnitude the same amount of nuclear power since the 80s. This has been a non-issue for longer than most HN commentators have been alive.

If politicians ever decide it has become an issue, the storage facility can be constructed.

WIPP exists[0]. This is just for weapons waste (which is a much higher concern btw). But honestly storing waste material on site isn't that big of a deal. The DOE has also invented significantly better storage systems in the last 50 years but simulations and small scale testing do not count as proven enough for large scale testing ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

But there are other deep geological repositories around the world.[1]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waste_Isolation_Pilot_Plant

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_geological_repository

What's more likely to kill us, nuclear waste or climate change?

You mean that Fukushima never killed anyone during normal operations? Because people died during the evacuation, a worker died due to lung cancer attributed to the disaster (it's mentioned in the article), and we are not sure if there will be any further deaths due to radiation exposure.