It's almost certainly not going to matter. Go back and read my post above and ask yourself whether there is any chance whatsoever that the Fukushima disaster co

It's almost certainly not going to matter. Go back and read my post above and ask yourself whether there is any chance whatsoever that the Fukushima disaster could possibly cause 50 million deaths. That's fifty million deaths. Why 50 million? Because that's about how many excess deaths have been caused by coal power over the lifetime of nuclear power. If Fukushima fails to cause 50 million deaths then the entire nuclear industry will be that much behind in the category of ending human lives. Are new buildouts of fission power plant capacity likely to cause enough deaths to even the balance scales between fission and coal? Extremely unlikely. Even if people build irresponsibly outdated designs like the Fukushima daichi plants or even criminally unsafe designs like the Chernobyl plants it's extraordinarily unlikely that the reduction in threat to human lives caused by being able to shut down coal plants will more than make up for the much smaller risk added due to operating nuclear plants. Edit: a much fairer assessment of relative risk of coal vs. nuclear would delve into deaths and injuries per kw-h, and it would also compare modern first world coal or gas plants vs. modern first world nuclear plants. But that math has already been done and shows that nuclear power is overwhelmingly one of the safest methods of producing power that has ever been created by mankind. And that remains unchanged even if you factor in Chernobyl and Fukushima (which in many ways are equivalent to allowing Chinese unfiltered coal plants into the equation on the other side). And even if you imagine some speculatively high number of deaths, even as many as tens of thousands, as the potential impact of the Fukushima daichi disaster there is just no way that the track record of the fission power industry to date could fall below the level of any other major power source that could potentially serve as base load power for a large industrialized country. It would take multiple Fukushima disasters happening every few years for the fission power industry to finally become as hazardous as gas or coal.