Addressing your points in order: The cost of Fukushima has to be measured against the benefit, IE the cost per gigawatt-hour of power created. FYI, the estim

Addressing your points in order: The cost of Fukushima has to be measured against the benefit, IE the cost per gigawatt-hour of power created. FYI, the estimated cost is about $200 billion per the Japanese government: https://apnews.com/article/d1b8322355f3f31109dd925900dff200 https://apnews.com/article/d1b8322355f3f31109dd925900dff200 So, to obtain a real comparison between the two, you'd have to add up the total costs of cleanup, environmental damage, health damage to people and animals, and all the other total costs of both fossil fuels generation and nuclear power. Hint: Whether you're looking at total cost of ownership per gigawatt hour or cost to produce electricity per GWh, nuclear is cheaper. >There's also the touchy issue of storing spent nuclear fuel and contaminated hardware. Not as touchy as you think. Most of the contaminated materials that exist are from nuclear weapons production, which is a completely separate problem from power plants. Right now, those power plants (at least in the US) are mostly storing their spent fuel in dry casks on site with few or no problems. The amount of dry cask storage needed fits within the boundaries of those sites so far.... IE, spent fuel is not a huge volume of material. > nuclear enthusiasts often equate that reliable under nominal conditions implies reliable in practice. As if negligence and stupidity weren't factors in the real world. This statement can apply to any real world engineering endeavor. You don't eliminate risk in a large project anyway. You anticipate it and mitigate it. You assume things will go wrong and make sure when they do that nothing particularly bad happens. That's just good design.