[agroot12]

There would be more deaths if Japan and Tepco would not pour billions of dollars into collecting as much waste as possible.

The waste of Fukushima is still an unsolved problem that will eat many billions more (see https://mobile.nytimes.com/2017/03/11/world/asia/struggling-...).

In fact, even when your reactor does NOT explode, you still have to manage the waste for 10,000 to 1,000,000 years (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_waste#Long_term_manage...). The radioactive materials are not only deadly due to their radiation; most of them are also highly toxic.

So even without a meltdown, you risk many lives in the future. Just because not many people have died yet does not make it a safe energy choice. Who in their right mind can guarantee safe storage of the waste for 10,000+ years?

[vidarh]

You don't need to be able to guarantee safe storage for 10,000+ years. For starters most of it can be reprocessed and reused, resulting in less dangerous waste. But no matter how reckless you decide to be with it, the amounts are small enough that it'll be nothing compared to the devastation caused by coal.

[glenneroo]

> For starters most of it can be reprocessed and reused...

Are any projects doing that or planning to? As far as I have read, it's still only a plausible theory but has yet to be implemented.

[vidarh]

It has been done since the 70's [1]. It has been banned in the US since '76 due to proliferation concerns. There are certainly challenges, but most of those challenges are down to stupid choices that were made in the 60's. Newer plants will continue to bring down the cost of using reprocessed fuel.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_reprocessing

[mpweiher]

France has been reprocessing for decades. Other projects were stopped for largely political reasons. Waste disposal is a political problem.

[0xfeba]

> So even without a meltdown, you risk many lives in the future. Just because not many people have died yet does not make it a safe energy choice.

Even if that's true, compared to the certain deaths per year caused by coal it still wins out.

[mpweiher]

>There would be more deaths if Japan and Tepco would not pour billions of dollars into collecting as much waste as possible.

(a) Citation needed.

(b) How many more deaths?

(c) Sure, it's good that we clean these things up. There would be more deaths from cars, airplanes, trains or just about anything if we didn't do something about it.

From the NYTimes article:

"400 tons of water a day"

Sounds bad, right? Except when you compare it to a coal plant, which produces about 350 tons of ash (which is more radioactive) and >500 tons of toxic sludge per day in normal operation.

Oh, and just how bad is that water?

"The authorities are debating whether it might be acceptable, given the relatively low radioactive levels in the water, to dilute the contaminated water and then dump it into the ocean."

And of course that is "low" under the current rules, which follow the linear extrapolation ("no safe dosage") assumption that is almost certainly wrong, and tend to be extremely conservative even within that framework.

"200,400 Cubic Meters of Radioactive Rubble"

Again, there is no context given. For water, 1 cubic meter is exactly 1 ton. Concrete is 2.4 tons per cubic meter, but it isn't clear how dense the rubble is. I am guessing significantly less dense than non-rubble concrete. But let's assume this is about 500 Kilotons of rubble, how does that compare?

"Reports indicate that some coastal areas generated as much as 4.35 million metric tons of waste each from the disaster,"[1] (that's the Tsunami, not the meltdown)

So that's about 10 times that amount, from each of several/many(?) sites. How radioactive is the Fukushima rubble? The New York Times article doesn't say, but the one I found (which also mentions 500 Kilotons) says that they measured "133 Bq/kg, well below the limit of 8000 Bq/kq". So 80 times below the limit, and the limits are conservative, so they are just processing it with the "normal" rubble from elsewhere.

How much is 133 Bq/kg? Well, the Potassium inside the human body means that humans produce around 40-60 Bq/kg[2], or a total 4000 Bq per person. Coffee is 1000 Bq/kg. Coal ash is 2000 Bq/kg. 1 household smoke detector with Americanium is 30000 Bq (not per kg, per unit).[2] Bananas are 31 Bq/g, so significantly more radioactive![2], with a single typical Banana of 175g being equivalent to 40 kilos of that rubble. So the rubble is not really all that radioactive and not all that scary.

And so on and so on...

Anyway, I fully understand where you are coming from. Nuclear is scary and the reporting is so incredibly one-sided and innumerate that it is hard to believe just how slanted it is. It certainly took me a while, because I wasn't suspicious, if anything I suspected the media were under-reporting. They aren't.

[1] http://www.naturalnews.com/033949_radioactivity_Fukushima.ht...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banana_equivalent_dose

[3] http://www.world-nuclear.org/information-library/safety-and-...