Okuma, Japan is already inhabitable again. Understand the reason people aren't moving back is less due to nuclear fallout but more because the whole town was leveled by the earthquake and tsunami.

That is actually a good point, and one that frequently irritates me: people are hand-wringing about the total non-issue of Fukushima Daichi to this day, because of media fear-mongering that the scary radiation would cross the Pacific and impact Americans.

Meanwhile, twenty thousand people had just died from a tsunami. Twenty thousand. Not to mention the complete destruction of infrastructure in a populous city, and the ramifications of that.

Not to forget that without the evacuation due to fear from the reactor killed people. According to a recent post on here [1] fukushima wouldn't have killed anyone without the evacuation.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26409247

Likewise, Pripyat remains a ghost town because it was planned city built to support the power plant workforce. Now that the power plants are no longer in operation, there's no incentive to clean it up and resettle it.

How do you explain the chernobyl exclusion zone?

They never bothered to clean it up because without the power plant, the town was dead. Most of the people living there were plant workers.

The soil and the groundwater are contaminated. You can't realistically replace those, not across 2,600 km^2.

Another problem is that most people (especially younger) don't want to live in rural area. They escaped due to tsunami, but no reason to back. Even who loved the area, there are few jobs, shops.

I was listening to the Cautionary Tales podcast (I know, I know, Gladwell) and one episode featured Fukushima.

Apparently follow ups of the evacuees suggest that we may have only given them an extra few days of life on average. The stress of uprooting people had nearly as large a health impact as the potential radiation. And not all of the evacuated area is uninhabitable. It was abandoned as a precaution.

Even if Fukushima is uninhabitable for 100 years, that could be a small price to pay to counter climate change. I don’t think the anti nuclear crowd are taking climate change as seriously as they should.