This article from 2008 did not age well. Just 3 years later, in Japan...
You should also look up Onagawa Nuclear Power Plant. It was closer to the epicenter than Fukushima No1, and was hit with a larger tsunami.
It survived because the plant director fought management, enforced strict safety regimens and performed emergency drills every 3 months.
Nuclear Power works, as evidenced by nuclear power plants and nuclear powered vessels across the planet. They are not exploding at random.
The problem is exclusively human.
For profit corporations cannot be trusted with nuclear power.
Lowest common denominators in governments cannot be trusted with nuclear power. (Japan, a prime example. I know because I live here.)
So who do we trust? A robust system of private and public organizations.
Will never happen here. All the nuclear authority directors have been idiots, purchased, or claimed the position through party politics.
That is the fundamental problem with Nuclear. If not managed properly it has the potential to be very unsafe.
Our world is too unstable and growing more so. I have doubts about our long term ability to safely manage reactors in a capitalist society.
As for the second Fukushima. Look at France. They are IMO one of the best examples of well regulated and managed nuclear power.
You will find mentions of maintenance recently, but this I because COVID delayed scheduled maintenance. (No one wanted the older specialized engineers catching COVID)
[1] https://www.nationalobserver.com/2022/12/22/news/japan-goes-...
I don’t know the answer but probably more than 150 I’d wager.
How much land is going to be rendered sub-arable over the next hundred years from climate change?
Let that sink in, after a nuclear disaster (and two MAJOR natural disasters), the most devastating impact of living in the area was having to live in underfunded temporary housing and the stigma of being viewed as "contaminated".
This is something every society needs a solution for. It's not just about nuclear, natural disasters happen all the time and the best system we have in place is "leave". We can do so much better. This is another instance where improving temporary public housing isn't "just for homeless people", it's for everyone.
> The year after the 2011 disaster, the Japanese government estimated that 573 people had died indirectly as a result of the physical and mental stress of evacuation.17 Since then, more rigorous assessments of increased mortality have been done, and this figure was revised to 2,313 deaths in September 2020.
Source: https://ourworldindata.org/what-was-the-death-toll-from-cher...
Don't get me wrong, I love nuclear power, but reporting numbers inaccurately/partially serves nobody.
EDIT: I am not sure what justifies the 3 instant downvotes, I am literally reporting accurate numbers in the face of someone minimizing them.
> No one died directly from the disaster. However, 40 to 50 people were injured as a result of physical injury from the blast, or radiation burns.
Since then one worker has died of lung cancer, and that is likely attributable. So zero or one death for the second worst civilian nuclear power incident in history.
It's very likely that area would have had to be evacuated one way or another, no? I think it's far more fair to attribute those 2313 deaths to the tsunami and earthquake.
If it was a coal plant, I don't think anyone would have been attributing 'stress deaths' to coal. Ditto any other kind of industrial or chemical plant that may or may not have been on that land.
The issue seems to have been a failure to properly safely evacuate people from an industrial zone.
It still is an exceptional incident and it is a ridiculously small death toll compared to the "normal" operation of coal plants yearly death toll... but it isn't a reason to minimize the numbers. As for the 1 direct death, I was referring to this part of my source:
> In 2018, the Japanese government reported that one worker has since died from lung cancer as a result of radiation exposure from the event.
Going by the official statement, I let them do the judging, they don't really have an interest in over-reporting as far as I know.
Do you have data for that? Or as compared to some other chemical or industrial plant?
Again, I think this just has to do with a failure to have an adequate evacuation plan, not the specific land use.
I don't think I have ever heard of such large zones for other industrial disasters, the estimatated maps I've seen for Bhopal, one of the if not the worst industrial chemical disaster ever, had a radius for the gas spread of about 7km (and it killed a lot more people really quickly). It is of course annecdotal, but each disaster has its own circumstances: wind, water/soil contamination, etc. that impose different measures to take... but in general nuclear disasters have a much wider radius for the fallout, that's why the security/processes for it are way more demanding and generally successfully applied.
But the main point was that we can't discount these risks and their results (deaths) when a disaster happened, as rare as they are (thankfully). They are part of it, and counting these deaths is just honest, as I said other sources of energy in the course of their "normal" operation kill way more people and destroy our environment in the process. It's a no-brainer to choose nuclear power over them.
Meanwhile, coal kills tens of thousands every year from pollution, windmills kill engineers and maintenance workers, and shoddy solar installs and battery banks set fire to buildings.
Nuclear is far from perfect, but Fukushima is a terrible example of the dangers of nuclear power.
And it seems every single technology proposed by nuclear advocates is rapidly deprecated. Notably replacement designs are almost all completely experimental.
Even this old, mismanaged plant had zero attributable deaths after what was basically the worst case scenario.