As a German, my country's reaction to Fukushima was and is bizarre to me. There was a natural disaster, a Tsunami, that cost upwards of 15000 lives, almost cer

As a German, my country's reaction to Fukushima was and is bizarre to me. There was a natural disaster, a Tsunami, that cost upwards of 15000 lives, almost certainly a good number of them when various pieces of technology failed due to the Tsunami. One of the pieces of technical infrastructure affected was a nuclear power plant of an old, already inherently not great design, safety wise, that we now know was not built to regulations. Despite all that, there have been 0 deaths attributable to that accident so far. Zero. Germany's reaction: OMG WE NEED TO GET RID OF NUCLEAR POWER. Utterly bizarre. For me, Fukushima was what convinced me that nuclear was much safer than I had previously thought, a fact confirmed by the data: https://ourworldindata.org/nuclear-energy https://ourworldindata.org/nuclear-energy The politicians did not "take Fukushima as an example why we should stop nuclear energy". They knew better. They just triangulated the public's irrational fears. And those irrational fears are stoked, maximally, by the press. See the recent reporting on the anniversary: "Am 11. März 2021 jährt sich zum zehnten Mal die Tsunami- und Atomkatastrophe von Japan, die bis zu 20.000 Menschen das Leben und rund 160.000 Japaner ihre Heimat kostete." https://www.zdf.de/dokumentation/zdfzeit/zdfzeit-der-ewige-gau-10-jahre-fukushima-100.html https://www.zdf.de/dokumentation/zdfzeit/zdfzeit-der-ewige-g... March 11, 2021 marks the tenth anniversary of the tsunami and nuclear disaster in Japan, which claimed the lives of up to 20,000 people and displaced around 160,000 Japanese. Not sure it is technically a lie, but suggesting this strongly that the 20000 deaths were caused at least equally by the Tsunami and the reactor accident is certainly not truthful reporting. And this isn't an isolated incident, pretty much all the reporting was this way. And of course this has the desired effect. And while I am not sure that the German public would consciously say that the 16000-20000 deaths were caused by the reactor accident, it is certainly how they feel, and the feeling gets reinforced time and time again. And so we turned off our cleanest and safest form of energy, spent trillions in order to miss our emissions targets and become ever more dependent on fossil fuels, in the process prompting a dictator to miscalculate our dependence and embolden him to start the most brutal war in Europe for almost a century. Yay us.