Fear is of these things is natural, but it needs to be moderated. Specifically, it needs to be moderated against the actual danger of nuclear power plants, which is astonishingly small: the number of direct victims of nuclear power accidents is under 100, and the number of indirect victims is similarly small. This is in contrast to coal- and oil-fired power plants, which directly contribute to the deaths of over 100,000 people in India alone[1].
Nuclear power is, on face value, very scary. But it's a lot less scary than just about everything else (modulo wind and solar power) we do to generate electricity, and has far better human and environmental outcomes even in its worst cases (Chernobyl).
More people die yearly from wind and solar power during manufacturing and installation than have died directly due to nuclear energy in its entire history as a power source. And yes, those direct numbers for nuclear include the entire supply chain for it if you weren't aware.
It would be interesting to see whether the number of deaths in wind and solar manufacturing are higher or lower than similar heavy industries and operations (e.g. linemanning, heavy fabrication). In any case, it all pales compared to the death and diminished quality of life that we just accept with coal and oil burning.
All that said, literally anything is better and safer than burning dinosaurs or biomatter. And the future really does need to be a mix of nuclear and geothermal (where available) for baseload demand with wind and solar combined with non-battery storage for peak demand smoothing.
Just have a look at the historical earthquake diagram from the official Japanese Meteorlogical Agency and compare it to its neighbor, the difference is night and day and so is the obvious risks...
It should have been avoided, and wasn't. How does that make anyone feel more secure that other plants will be any safer at all? I argue that it does not.
If anything, that statement only solidifies the other posts in this thread who talk about businesses focus on short term metrics and profit margins calling all safety into question.
But, that's true of literally every source of energy. You have to look at the danger posed holistically.
And the fact is, the actual realized danger posed by old generation nuclear is orders of magnitude less dangerous than every fossil fuel source, even when accounting for major disasters like Chernobyl and Fukishima. https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy
In light of this data, it seems to me that any decision to avoid nuclear that leads to more fossil fuel burning, which is almost always what happens when we prematurely shut down nuclear plants, is almost criminally the wrong choice.
I think nuclear is just so complex it's too hard/easy to make viable arguments in either direction, and things just boil down to "danger" and "cost". My skeptical bone points out that implementation is always messy compared to theory, so we should expect building flaws/design compromises/flawed processes to result in failures at some small percent of nuclear facilities. And given how catastrophic those failures can be, it's hard to justify it. But the climate side of the argument is equally scary: if we don't switch away from carbon-based power sources, massive areas of our world are going to become uninhabitable, underwater, or dramatically change in ways that destroy life as we know it. So maybe that small fraction of failures is acceptable? And in all fairness, the major nuclear failures I can think of -- Fukushima, Chernobyl -- came with comparatively few deaths, and a moderate cost of now-uninhabitable land. Perhaps less than climate change will come with over the coming decades.
Most of the land is actually inhabitable but they just keep people away because it's safer to err on the side of caution. When it comes to Fukushima Daichii, more people died in the evacuation than will ever die or have ever died from the radiation exposure that occurred.
A massive tragedy had just happened, and people basically ignored that and focused on the cable news hype about a total non-issue.
nobody is making that claim, because it is clear that people make errors. this isn't some wild revelation to engineers that they've all missed.
rather, the claim is that modern reactor designers are safe(r) now _because_ they don't require everything be done right.
Early estimates placed insured losses from the earthquake alone at US$14.5 to $34.6 billion. The Bank of Japan offered ¥15 trillion (US$183 billion) to the banking system on 14 March 2011 in an effort to normalize market conditions. The World Bank's estimated economic cost was US$235 billion, making it the costliest natural disaster in history. According to a 2020 study, "the earthquake and its aftermaths resulted in a 0.47 percentage point decline in Japan’s real GDP growth in the year following the disaster."
Yes, we can and should make nuclear power safer - but let's not overstate the risk. The reactor failures were a tiny part of an enormous disaster, and not by any means the worst part of it.
Risk is rarely phrased in terms of "100% correct" because risk-management in engineering is well aware of the "swiss cheese model" of failure. More accurately, disaster occurs not when things go less than 100% perfect, but when things start approaching 100% wrong. All of the redundant layers of safety have to fail such that catastrophic failure is the outcome.
The real question is how many layers of safety is enough? Chernobyl, clearly insufficient. Fukushima, still flawed, and folks knew so at the time. The high water mark is such that none of the mistakes of Chernobyl or Fukushima would ever be made again, and we have not one, but two generations and 50 years of improved designs since Fukushima.
EDIT: And they were already at least 11 years behind on that work at that point.
Related fact, roof top solar actually kills more people per MWh than nuclear, and that is entirely due to installation accidents.
What worries me is that we need to have MTBF go down as the number of plants go up, otherwise we're making planet-wide safety worse. And I'm expecting full-system MTBF to be really hard to measure, let alone guarantee improvements on. Hence, I'm going to assume we're on path to making nuclear power riskier by scaling it up.
We've only been splitting atoms for a hundred years. It's very unlikely that we've seen the worst-ever accident yet, or the last bomb ever dropped. I have no idea what to do with this feeling, but I am happy my time on Earth is bounded.
This is problem because they still have much amount of stopped nuclear plants like Kashiwazaki. IMO they should give their plants to other better companies. Some other power companies passed regulation and restarted some their nuclear plants.
Two not so far away, but it would take an incident worse than Chernobyl to create long term issues for the bay area (one could perhaps debate the threshold of what a long term issue might be)
Oh and I remember that Berkeley is a "Nuclear-free Zone" (you'll see the signs as you enter) but that they once had a research reactor :D