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Comment by avastmick | Hacker News Reader

This is an excellent resource that consolidates data that is largely scattered.

I wonder the motivation for those who are so anti-nuclear that they would distort the data or even lie in many cases.

Surely, the fourth largest earthquake, plus a huge tsunami leaving so many dead, yet causing so little provable danger from the nuclear facility would, in most other domains, be generally seen as a resounding endorsement of its safety.

Nuclear is like terrorism in that the fear and reality of effect are so far apart. In both cases it’s far more dangerous to ride in a car.

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> This is an excellent resource

No, it's trying to minimize the costs - it's a coverup.

- the cleanup cost will be around $1 trillion and require significant army and political involvement for decades. These are costs borne by the taxpayer. (The Japanese PM actually coordinated the response directly after the plant operators started to abandon the site in the middle of the crisis!)

- 250,000 area residents were evacuated to school gyms, etc. and many will die there

- the US govt. intervened to analyze the true risks with a drone, and notified the Japanese that if the cooling ponds evaporate, there will be a fire and airborne release. So that was another emergency that had to be remedied.

- the operator was notified of the risks of flooding years beforehand. To save money, they defied the recommendations.

Stop being a nuclear apologist when you're incapable of understanding the most basic issues at hand. Merkel, who I don't respect, is right in this case that if it can happen in Japan, then it can happen in Germany.

> In both cases it’s far more dangerous to ride in a car.

Until you get a bill for $1 trillion. Can they send it to you?

While I agree with some of your points (such as, the operators of the plant were criminally negligent for not responding to the known flooding from tsunami risk) the overall point of the article is much of the permanent evacuations and decontamination work, and also germany's decision to phase out nuclear power are a vast overreaction.

This overreaction is the reason the disaster was so costly, and also the article makes the valid point the costs of the nuclear accident are conflated with the costs of the earthquake and tsunami by groups looking to discredit nuclear power.

Yes, in the immediate days after the accident/tsunami it was not clear how bad it was going to get, and the initial evacuation was justified based on that risk but once the situation was stabilized then the people evacuated from the majority of the exclusion zone should have been allowed to return home.

Germany was already planning to shut down its nuclear power plants, it simply sped up the process.

So they did. Now they burn coal.

Sorry you feel so emotionally about this topic. However please refrain from ad hominem attacks: it doesn’t help constructive discussion.

There are facts that do not readily line up with the scale of response to the failures that surround the disaster.

Compared to the damage that coal and gas has on the environment and the numbers who will suffer through their continued use in power production or die in their sourcing, nuclear seems a reasonably safe alternative. Note too the many many trillions that will be spent in addressing climate change, again nuclear seems a cost effective alternative.

Taking solutions off the table due to bias, poor data and evidence doesn’t help find a path ahead for power production for humanity’s future needs.

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