Fukushima also coincided with the largest earthquake Japan has ever seen (which caused Fukushima incident itself and complicated evacuation efforts). The expected death toll ranges between several hundred and several thousands.

By comparison, vehicle emission is expected cause ~20,000 premature deaths in the US, every year [1]. (Sorry, I couldn't find a stat for Japan.)

In other words, mankind's second worst nuclear disaster killed about as many people as vehicle emission kills in the US every month. That's not counting car accidents.

In fact the wikipedia page about the disaster [2] contains this amusing bit of information, which might not be a fair way of looking at it, but I can't say it's factually wrong:

> it has been estimated that if Japan had never adopted nuclear power, accidents and pollution from coal or gas plants would have caused more lost years of life.

[1] https://apnews.com/article/science-health-business-environme...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_Daiichi_nuclear_disa...

The death toll for the Fukushima nuclear plant (as opposed to to deaths from the tsunami) is either zero or one. There was one 80 year-old who died of lung cancer, but it's unclear whether the cause was radiation from the incident or if he'd have died of lung cancer anyway as many 80 year-old smokers in Japan do.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/sofialottopersio/2021/11/04/no-...

The population exposure from radiation from Fukushima will likely cause some hundreds of cancers. These will not be statistically detectable, but that doesn't mean they won't exist and that policy cannot take their plausible existence into account.

Any sources for this estimation? I've read nothing even remotely close to that prediction. At its peak, people in Fukushima city were only receiving ~0.06 mSv/day of radiation. This only lasted a couple of days. The vast majority of people didn't even face that since they were evacuated.

In contrast, a transatlantic flight results in about 0.1 mSv of radiation. Someone getting a single abdomen x-ray would get over 0.2 mSv.

It's a ballpark from 2 million people exposed to an extra dose of about 1 mSv.

> mankind's second worst nuclear disaster killed about as many people as vehicle emission kills in the US every month.

In fact the tsunami killed 20,000 people - and would have done so regardless of whether there was a power plant accident. The nuclear accident killed one person.

Fukushima in 2011 is very similar to Oroville Dam in 2017. 154,000 evacuated vs 180,000, and both were caused by very rare natural disaster. Both involved failures in handling emergency scenarios like natural disaster, and failures in technology that was supposed to prevent catastrophic failures. Both also involved political failures in addressing risk to people who live near those power plants, and failures in addressing prior safety concerns.

Hopefully those incident will have taught those countries to respect the enormous destructive forces involved, create a work culture where safety concerns do not get ignored, and to build power plants with consideration of very rare natural disaster.

Issues with Fukushima that could've prevented the disaster were raised by engineers/scientists but were ignored for years by the government/politicians

Similar claims are often made after accidents, especially by people sympathetic to engineers an scientists (such as at HN). Given a large enough population, you can always find people who predict disaster. Every leader (of a large enough population) has to decide which predictions to trust and which not to; there isn't enough money and time in the world to listen to them all, and to perfect any machine - especially large, highly complex ones.

The question is not 'was this one prediction accurate?', but 'how reliable is that population of predictions?'

...and what lessons can we draw from this?

Trust your nuclear scientists/engineers because they know what they're doing and are, in fact, not playing god

That's always going to happen though.

The government doesn't always have attention and money to shower on nuclear plants.

So? Anything could have been prevented on hindsight.

It's not hindsight when someone warns you beforehand.

Given a large enough population, you can always in hindsight find someone who predicted the outcome.

Fukushima caused exactly one death from ionizing radiation:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_Daiichi_nuclear_di...

Fossil fuel air pollution cause one fifth of premature death worldwide:

https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/c-change/news/fossil-fuel-air-p...

Do the sources I use suit you? Is it enough to convey sense about the orders of magnitude involved?

And I didn't even talk about CO2 and the impending climate change catastrophe looming.

Exactly no one is advocating the use of fossil fuels to replace nuclear.

In a debate, it is much better to counter the actual arguments instead of the more convenient ones.

1) Outdated design

2) Magnitude 9 earthquake

3) Devastating tsunami

4) Catastrophic fire causing loss of power to all control systems

One (1) person died from radiation.

Just how safe do you expect something to be?

How many fatalities would there be if there were a similar sequence of events affecting something like (e.g.) the Three Gorges Dam in China?

A lot more than one, you can bet.

Let’s build a nuclear plant in a country famous for tsunamis next on the coast. What could go wrong?