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Comment by Ultramanoid | Hacker News Reader

While I understand where you're coming from, consider that there were initially hundreds of thousands displaced; tens of thousands still to this day. PTSD, depression, and profoundly disrupted lives. Many lost everything, and many will never return home. From this one incident.

Edit : I am specifically replying to the phrase "the impact to human life is minimal" when referring to Fukushima. I am not comparing harm of nuclear versus harm of fossil fuels, etc. Fukushima's consequences were, and still are now to a very large number of people, including displaced, farmers, fishermen, and even the effects on commerce and relations between Japan and neighbouring nations ( Taiwan's food ban, etc ), anything but minimal. How much cancer cases increased is not the relevant measure point here.

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As opposed to the crippling health effects of fossil fuels? Fossil fuels are causing harm on a global scale orders of magnitude more than nuclear. And not just physical harm to humans, but ecological and economic harm as well.

Nuclear is by far the lesser of the two evils, providing baseload level amounts of carbon neutral energy with nearly a century lifespan, highly regulated and being far, far safer than any competing energy source.

I'm largely supportive of nuclear power, except for one problem: All new plants seem to require large public subsidies, both direct and indirect.

To get Hinkley Point C built, UK taxpayers have to guarantee an electricity price well above market rate, and the taxpayer has to underwrite all the loans, and the taxpayer will be on the hook for any accident cleanup costs above the reactor's $1bn insurance, and the taxpayer will be storing the waste, and guess who'll be paying for the decommissioning? That's right, in all probability it'll be the taxpayer.

In nuclear is the future, we're in for a very expensive future.

Are you under the impression that fossil fuels aren't similarly subsidised?

> While I understand where you're coming from, consider that there were initially hundreds of thousands displaced; tens of thousands still to this day. PTSD, depression, and profoundly disrupted lives. Many lost everything, and many will never return home. From this one incident.

This was in part (or, from what I read some time ago, mostly) caused by irrational fear and overrreaction to the incident, causing an evacuation much larger than necessary.

Well, there was definitely a bigger overreaction from foreigners living here, in fact. Thus the term fly-jin, thrown around quite a bit in those days. Pervasive PTSD and depression amongst the many thousands still displaced today ( specially the elderly ) is very real. There was an excellent article somewhere from a couple of years ago that I can't quite find right now.

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