Much of the Fukushima area is inhabited again (the exclusion zone has shrunk from an original 1250km2 down to 371) and there is ample evidence that the overreaction evacuation did a lot more harm than good.

Thousands of times of that area is lost permanently every year to climate change, extractive industries, desertification, pollution etc. (just desertification is estimated at around 2500x that number). With nuclear we always proceed with extreme to absurd levels of caution, in no small part because radiation is extremely easy to measure - unlike almost every other contaminant we put in the environment, which are harder to quantify and our risk response is generally "oh it's totes fine". See: PFAS, microplastics, endocrine-disrupting chemicals dropping sperm count and reproductive health indicators on the entire planet, PM air pollution, UPFs, blood lead levels, military chemicals etc. etc.

But if the Geiger counter ticks too fast once everyone in a 100 mile radius loses their mind. Nuclear accidents are not fine. Obviously. The impact is dramatically, comically overstated compared to literally any other environmental concern.

Rationalizations.

> The irrational fear-factor associated with anything nuclear is highlighted by how much attention Fukushima, the nuclear disaster, which gravely injured like a dozen people, gets relative to the earthquake and tsunami causing it, which killed 20k people and leveled a huge stretch of coast.

It leveled a huge stretch of coast, but didn't make it uninhabitable.

The false equivalences here are mind-numbingly obvious to anyone actually thinking about this instead of parroting something they've read.

I remember not being able to buy milk in Europe (Switzerland and Germany) in the 1980s because of Chernobyl. The increase in radioactivity in milk was orders of magnitude, due to fallout from Cesium 134 and 137 as well as isotopes of strontium and plutonium.

Now of course, the radiate-the-planet types always want to claim that was a one-off. But have you looked at the government of the United States of America recently? Imagine that group gets re-elected. They can't even manage simple construction projects or pools of water. Do you really want to trust the integrity of large swaths of the planet to people like that?

Or to people like the nutcases in Silicon Valley - Thiel, Musk, etc. - who think that regulations are for pussies.

The idea that humans can handle nuclear power responsibly is a sci-fi dream that our species is nowhere close to achieving. Stop confusing your fantasies with reality, it's dangerous to all of us.

> It leveled a huge stretch of coast, but didn't make it uninhabitable.

This is not actually true, because it deleted around 120 km² of habitable land (https://www.forbes.com/sites/oshadavidson/2011/04/29/japan-e...). Engineering just to reclaim that land continues to this day and has already cost trillions of Yen. The damage the tsunami did to other structures and people (without literally sinking the ground into the sea) were much more expensive than that.

> I remember not being able to buy milk in Europe (Switzerland and Germany) in the 1980s because of Chernobyl. The increase in radioactivity in milk was orders of magnitude, due to fallout from Cesium 134 and 137 as well as isotopes of strontium and plutonium.

Circling back to the easy to measure part, dividing most numbers by something close to zero tends to turn out big, the ratio says fairly little about whether that's dangerous (https://www.bfs.de/EN/topics/ion/accident-management/emergen... "To date, there is no evidence that the reactor accident has caused adverse health effects due to radiation in Germany"). I'm also fairly certain neither strontium nor plutonium particles (plural) made it that far.

Nobody said “it’s fine”, I’m pointing out that it’s nowhere near as bad as the fear-mongers claim, and it’s being cleaned up, not to mention the exclusion zone was decided under the linear no threshold model so it’s nowhere near uninhabitable.

If you want uninhabitable areas go take a hike in the ww1 red zones.

Around 98% of Fukushima is inhabited again, unless of course you meant the NPP itself, but people were not living in a power plant to begin with.

That’s the entirety of the prefecture, most of which had not been evacuated.