Fukushima, for all the flaws (including some paranoia that led to unnecessary evacuations, etc), still didn't kill anyone even though thousands of people died in the tsunami. That's how safe nuclear is.
Also, what do you mean by paranoia and unnecessary evacuations? Nobody could even guess what was going to happen. When will explosions happen? How many? What direction will the wind blow? The power plant was out of control. The US government didn't assist with evacuations until AFTER the first release which spread contamination south hitting Tokyo, and east hitting their own USS Ronald Reagan.
Paranoid? Unnecessary? Sorry, that's a cruel thing to say to those who were contaminated.
"That's how safe nuclear is."
And it’s cruel to move thousands of people by force (and some of them died in the process). This is just an appeal to emotions, please don’t do that. There is already plenty to discuss about the effect of low-level radiation and risk assessments. Everybody is contaminated with radionuclides, there are numbers you can use to show that this specific contamination was more important than different background levels. Looking at those numbers show that the exclusion zone was vastly over-estimated.
That's not a compelling argument, when the premise is misleading. While you (and others) split hairs over what "kill" means, people actually die from it.
https://ourworld.unu.edu/en/radiation-from-fukushima-disaste...
https://world.wng.org/2014/09/locals_suffer_long_term_effect...
There was an actual tsunami that killed thousands of people directly. And worsened, slightly by climate change ocean level rise (by us refusing to decommission fossil fuel plants).
Hell, even if you count all the people that have to evacuate for each Fukushima, we are still only at 4 million people moved/year vs. 8.7 million people death/year with fossil fuel power generation.
There are three more things to keep in mind:
1. I don't think we will have anywhere near 10 Fukushimas every year.
2. A lot of those stressed related death and evacuations are due to overly precautionary measures.
3. Death is much worse than having to relocate.
Yes, nuclear power generation does kill. However, the point is, it is significantly safer than fossil fuel.
The problem with pressurised water reactors is that failure is a very low probability but potentially very large consequences event. The advantage of fossil fuels (for public acceptance) is whilst the risk and the number of deaths are much higher (by a couple of orders of magnitude), the effects are spread out across space and time, and so are easy to ignore in our daily lives.
All this is a tragic misunderstanding of the situation we’re in. Ultimately, 100% renewables is a worthy goal. In the short to long term, shutting down nuclear power plants means burning fossil fuel. Climate is already spiralling out of control. The time to clean up our acts was 50 years ago, and now every decade we spend burning gas, oil, and coal is something we will pay dearly.
So yeah, nuclear is not ideal. It’s still part of the best strategy we have to produce clean energy.
> Quantifying the number of deaths or cancers in this case tells you nothing relevant to make a decision or risk assessment
The two conflicting viewpoints posited in the same paragraph, seems ironic. The first is the issue, but requires veracity. The second is nonsensical. Humans make these decisions every day.
Humans make a lot of stupid decisions rooted in gut feeling and prejudice all the time. A small subset of these decisions involve long-term industrial strategy at a national level or the life of millions of people. For these decisions we ought to do better.
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yucca_Mountain_nuclear_waste_r...
If politicians ever decide it has become an issue, the storage facility can be constructed.
But there are other deep geological repositories around the world.[1]
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waste_Isolation_Pilot_Plant
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_geological_repository