safety
in 2010 the daiichi nuclear power plants produced some 29 terawatt-hours of electricity. they've been in operation for some 40 years. over the course of their lifetime they've produced some 580 twh. let's pretend they were never built. and japan burned coal for power instead. from current statistics, one can estimate that 93,000 people would have died from mining accidents and pollution. i kinda stuck my head in the sand at the start of this catastrophe. my fears of a knee jerk reaction backlash against nuclear power got the best of me. still, 93k is a ballpark estimate for the number of deaths caused by chernobyl. which was 10x to 100x worse. the death toll from fukushima is likely to be in the 1k to 10k range. that's on top of the 13k deaths from the earthquake and tsunami. yeah, thousands of people dead is bad. make no mistake about that. but letting an irrational fear of nuclear power force us to choose an alternative that would kill 10x to 100x more would be a humanitarian disaster of our own making.