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Comment by mkesper | Hacker News Reader

How can you say that without being cynic when it made big parts of Japan uninhabitable for centuries if not thousands of years?

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The failure of the Banqiao Dam in China in 1975 killed 171,000 people; 11,000,000 people lost their homes. This is many orders of magnitude higher than the casualties and damages directly attributed to the failure of Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant.

Furthermore, Fukushima Daiichi was an old design (more than a decade older than Chernobyl nº4 reactor) whereas modern designs are much more safe.

Fukushima Daiichi was also subjected to a historically significant natural disaster, it wasn't exactly an "everyday" or even "every century" event.

And the area around the reactor isn't uninhabitable, it's just illegal to live there at the moment.

Yes. What is funny is that some of my countrymen, who lived in Japan as expats, left the area because of radiation, and came back home, where the natural background radiation is higher than in the evacuated Fukushima area.

From what I can tell, Banqiao Dam was dual-purpose: it was intended for flood control as well as power generation. If China had sourced power from a nuclear plant, the dam would likely still have failed and killed hundreds of thousands of people, we just wouldn't be able to attribute those deaths to hydroelectric power.

Furthermore, modern nuclear power plants may be safe but they aren't exactly economically viable, which is why nuclear operators are so keen on extending the operation of existing plants of the same design as Fukushima Daiichi. Also, I'm pretty sure the official position on Fukushima was that it was safe, right up until it wasn't.

The fact remains that hydro power requires storing the potential energy of a very large amount of water. This is inherently a danger for the population living downstream. I certainly would prefer to live in the vicinity of a nuclear power plant rather than in the floodpath of a large dam.

Not to mention that if something goes wrong with a plant, you'll probably have time to evacuate. If a dam fails catastrophically, you'll probably first know when you feel the ground shaking, and that will be too late for you.

Do you have quantitative information about that? I was always wondering how big is Fukushima's nuclear incident zone (in km^2) today. How much bigger is it compared to coal waste ponds / landfills, or hydroelectric dam which provides the same amount of power?

The problem with coal as well, is that the effect of its pollution is known to contribute to many deaths a year, especially in the elderly, people with compromised cardiopulmonary systems, and of course, the asthmatic. It's not like a nuclear disaster though, where someone comes in "radioactive" with coal. The best we can do is explain the statistical link.

When nuclear goes wrong, it's much less lethal, but so much more easy to recognize and very dramatic. Then again, we live in a world of people obsessed with shark attacks and winning the lottery, but who drive around in cars all day.

The exclusion zone is 20km, so the area will be around 600 km^2. Compare that to Lake Mead, which is 640 km^2 and runs a power station with half the installed capacity of Fukushima Daiichi.

A circle of 20km is 1200 km^2.

In this case, only half the circle was over land, but the evacuation zone also extended about 40km downwind, based on the amount of radiation, so the original exclusion zone was also about 1200 km^2.

Since then, part of the exclusion has been lifted: I think in this map, the green areas are places which are no longer restricted. The yellow areas can be visited with a permit, but you are not allowed to live in them or stay over night. The pink area is the "difficult to return" zone, I think the government treats this as a total loss and reimburses house owners for the full value of their property.

http://userdisk.webry.biglobe.ne.jp/001/285/53/N000/000/009/...

From counting pixels in the picture, it seems the yellow+pink area is 670 km^2, and the pink area is 330 km^2.

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