> Fukushima ...(correct me if I'm wrong), is a lost city that won't be possible to inhabit for thousands of years.

Please edit your comment. You're completely wrong, and it's unsubstantiated speculation like this that drapes everything in FUD. People are already returning to the immediate vicinity of the power plant, having only been excluded this long because of ludicrously conservative recommendations.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/japan/1065957...

(The actual city of Fukushima and the rest of the Fukushima prefecture have been safe, even according to the highly conservative recommendations, for a long time now. I'm not sure they were ever even evactuated. As teraflop notes, the above article refers to the small town of Ōkuma in which the reactor was located.)

As expected, the actual harm caused by the meltdown is essentially undetectable above background levels, and is trivial compared to the tsunami disaster that precipitated it. Most of the harm done comes from fear mongering when no actual risk exists.

http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/03/10/us-japan-fukushima...

> when no actual risk exists

Now who's over-stating their case? 0% risk?

Please don't stoop to this level of discourse. If there are two possible readings of a comment, one reasonable and one unreasonable, it's best to choose the reasonable one.

Some clarification: Fukushima is a prefecture covering 14,000 square kilometers, with about 2 million residents. The town of Ōkuma, where the Fukushima Daiichi power station is located, had a population of 11,000 and has been evacuated to a radius of 10 km. That's a very conservative exclusion zone that reflects a slightly increased lifetime risk of certain cancers; the area that's actually "uninhabitable" is extremely small. No need to blow things out of proportion.

Do you have a source for that? What I've read suggests that the towns involved are seen as safe to return to:

http://in.reuters.com/article/2013/08/14/japan-decontaminati...

The main problems from what I've seen are psychological and social. Which are still real problems. One expert says:

"We know from Chernobyl that the psychological consequences are enormous. Life expectancy of the evacuees dropped from 65 to 58 years -- not [predominately] because of cancer, but because of depression, alcoholism and suicide. Relocation is not easy, the stress is very big. We must not only track those problems, but also treat them. Otherwise people will feel they are just guinea pigs in our research." -- http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/studying-the-fukus...

> the former, (correct me if I'm wrong), is a lost city that won't be possible to inhabit for thousands of years.

You are horribly wrong. The radiation levels there have fallen off as well.

And as far as people are concerned, there are people living in Chernobyl right now, which was far worse.

> And as far as people are concerned, there are people living in Chernobyl right now, which was far worse.

[citation needed]

Aside from that Pripyat is what should be discussed.

Fukushima-the-city, the capital of the Fukushima prefecture, has almost nothing to do with the Fukushima Daiichi disaster. It was practically not affected at all and is certainly not "lost".

I thought people were still living there now? I remember news reports from half a year ago.