Any industrial accident causes pollution that has to be cleaned up and has an annular ring around the site you shouldn't be in. There are 1334 superfund cleanup sites in the US. Fukushima is in no way unusual in this regard except that nuclear waste is really easy to detect - with a geiger counter for instance - whereas PFAs aren't.

We learn and we improve for next time.

Compare Apples to Apples and it’s an extreme outlier. The quick response and extreme expenditure to contain and cleanup Fukushima mitigated it’s impact. But it’s not even close to being safe to walk away from today.

By comparison almost all superfund sites would have been dealt with for a tiny fraction of the cost and effort, assuming a similarly prompt response.

The main thing we learned from US Superfund sites is that it’s better to sell off old polluted assets to small shell companies that can go bankrupt instead of paying to clean up the environmental damage. Cleanups are always someone else’s problem — worst case, the retired CEO’s stock could lose its value — so there’s no real need to worry environmental safety.