It is a cost generated by the paranoia of anti-nukes, their uncritical belief in the Linear No Threshold assumption, their indifference to deaths by air pollution, which can only be addressed by building more nuclear plants.
How much money do our stupid media driven anti-nukes think would be required to clean up the mercury being released all around by the coal being burned while we all wait for the grand renewable nirvana that has not come, is not here, and will not come?
The answer is that nothing will be done to clean it up, because nothing can be done because no amount of money can clean it up.
(I often wonder if "mad hatter disease" induced by coal, also known as Minamata disease, accounts for the existence of Republicans and anti-nukes.)
Suppose Japan chose to spend 100 billion dollars to provide clean water to everyone on this planet who lacks it, roughly 50 dollars per person. How many lives would be saved? Suppose they took 10 billion dollars to fund laboratories to really test the linear no threshold assumption, which is in my view, killing people with selective attention. Could they then make a rational estimate of risk?
The problem with the morally vapid assholes who chant about Fukushima endlessly is that they do not have the intellectual, moral, educational, or practical sense to even make very crude comparisons in this area.
The fact is that 20,000 people died in the Great Tōhoku Earthquake from seawater. How many people died again from radiation?
What would be a better idea and save more lives, spending the same trillions of dollars squandered on so called "renewable energy" fantasies, littering the oceans with greasy junk, or spending the same money trying to prevent far more than 20,000 seawater deaths from rising seas?
Don't know? Couldn't care less?
No surprise there.
People are dying right now, all over the world from extreme temperatures because we have assholes who applaud and indeed celebrate their paranoia about radiation. They are willing to demand the expenditure of billions of dollars to save very few, if any lives, from radiation, and won't give a dime to bury the dead who die because we don't expand nuclear power as fast as is humanly possible.
Usually this asinine rhetoric comes with a citation from some dumb reporter somewhere who doesn't ask any of these questions, thus motivating my oft stated suspicion that one cannot get a degree in journalism if one has passed a college level science course with a grade of C or better.
It would be interesting to see if we had a dumb shit anti-nuke, including one "I'm not an anti-nuke" anti-nukes, who could be talked into having an episode of critical thinking, but experience teaches they'd rather not. While the planet dies from something other than Fukushima, specifically climate change, they can't focus their tiny little brains on anything but Fukushima.
These sorts disgust and outrage me.
That their ignorance and obsessions have prevailed is the reason why history will not forgive us, nor should it.
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