Their point is that these risks are overblown. Nobody died from Fukushima. So if the major accident you're concerned about was, in fact, completely due to human error [and even still the number of deaths was relatively small], why are you still so skeptical?
Finally, when literal millions die per year because of air pollution, you are choosing something significantly more dangerous [and worse for the environment] because of many fewer memorable nuclear power-related deaths.
I'm not even sure that the number of people who died
or could die is really the most severe point but i rather believe it is the cost of a nuclear accident.
We as a society decide every day to let people die because it is too expensive. Think of healthcare, safety norms or human aid.
And having massive areas in high developed countries beeing uninhabitable is unbelieveble costly.
Think what 100 sqm in california would amount to.
Even more troubling.. There's a similar generation nuclear reactor about 40 miles from NYC. Just imagine the cost if Manhattan was in an exclusion zone.
There are areas over 100km away that are still in the closed zone. They found hotspots of >100 curies/sq km up to 300km from the reactors. It's not like there's a safe little 30km concentric circle.
If NYC were upwind from Indian Point, I woudln't be "fear-mongering" but an event like Chernobyl would very likely impact NYC.
Nobody died but a large region had to be evacuated. How much would it cost to insure against that? Is nuclear power still cost-effective if we include the cost of insuring against having to evacuate?
You can't tacitly accept the costs of our current means of power while criticizing the costs of nuclear. We need to make this decision explicitly, not implicitly.
When you ask about the costs of nuclear power are you also considering the costs of not using nuclear power? [delays timeline for 100% renewable energy which has climate costs, causes air pollution separate from that which is killing millions annually, etc]
Part of the reason it was evacuated was that overblown perception of risks. The evacuation itself did more harm to people that staying in place ever would.
The harm caused to people who evacuated was finding a new supermarket in the (nearby) town they moved to versus significantly higher risks of cancer if they had stayed. Think of a 10x increase in rates of Thyroid cancer. This might cause one or two deaths over a decade depending on the sparseness of population, but we are talking about people's lives.
In terms of insurance, the region was known for some rare produce, saké, and tourism, but I think well-being should be the primary concern.
Evacuation is never about "just" finding a new supermarket. For starters, it means total destruction of the economy of the evacuated area (= livelihood of its people), as well as a serious disruption to the area receiving evacuees. Then, the process of evacuation (and subsequent mess at the destination) increases chances of various accidents that can cause death or serious injury, and quite likely increases crime as well. Finally, at any given time in any area that's larger than a village there are people undergoing emergency medical care or who otherwise can't leave the hospital - massive evacuation will likely kill those (not to mention the strain on medical care resources the receiving area will experience).
Evacuations are serious business and are not clean and harmless.
It seems you are right about hospital evacuations. From 2012,
"A hospital [Futaba Hospital] near the disaster-stricken Fukushima No. 1 nuclear plant made no mistakes during a hasty evacuation in March 2011 during which 40 patients and nursing home residents lost their lives, according to a report released on Sept. 30 by investigators commissioned by the hospital."
Unfortunately, that hospital is within 3km of the reactor and was evacuated between March 12th and March 16th. It's also worth noting that the radiation level on the day of the disaster, March 11, was 1,590 uSv/hr at a point 5km away (normal background radiation for a city is 0.25 uSv/hr). This is, per hour, more radiation than background exposure for a year in most cities.
Fukushima Prefecture is the third largest prefecture in Japan, and most of its largest cities emerged from the disaster with minor earthquake damage. Also, luckily, the area around the reactor is made up of small towns and villages, so I would like to believe the community's support has aided most of the refugees, but obviously it was a hardship.
Perhaps, but that means the cost of nuclear power is not purely technical. To keep the cost reasonable, you need to convince government authorities and the general public that they don't need to evacuate. It's a tough political challenge and can't be wished away.
True, but a) the chance of an event warranting evacuation (or even perceived as such) over lifetime of a nuclear reactor is negligible, and b) somehow this problem was solved for chemical plants, factories, coal plants, etc.
Yes, reversing the radiophobia will take a lot of work, political and otherwise, but realizing that it's the only real thing that blocks nations from building nuclear plants is a good start.
An insurance company that considered the risk of evacuation to be negligible would be negligent. It's important to estimate the likelihood of rare risks when they're very expensive and you have to pay for them.
Get Berkshire Hathaway to insure against this risk and I'll believe it's a reasonable one to take.
It would be very difficult to change this picture [http://worrydream.com/ClimateChange/#production] to using only clean energies without ramping up our nuclear.
Finally, when literal millions die per year because of air pollution, you are choosing something significantly more dangerous [and worse for the environment] because of many fewer memorable nuclear power-related deaths.