Probably because they were safer on the trains than they would have been in cars? You'd still have people in transit, and I'm not a mechanical engineer or physicist but I'd think it was obvious that trains hold up a little better to giant waves than the typical japanese car.
There is less radiation risk from normally operating German nuclear power stations than there is from all the radionuclides the extra coal burning stations will emit.
Although since Germany hit on the idea of exporting it's dirty coal to Poland, burning it there and importing the power they will be east europeans getting the cancer.
Well, I was talking about being hit by tsunamis, not radiation.
I prefer nuclear power to coal myself but I must clarify that "normally operating nuclear power stations" aren't what people worry about with nuclear power.
Yes, but people don't give a flying fuck about coal or coal seam fires when globally coal seam fires release 40 tons of mercury into the atmosphere, 3% of the worlds annual CO2 emissions. Not to mention they're releasing a crap-load of radioactive materials on their own.
People are idiots. They worry about nuclear power going "wrong", but don't worry about all the other far more dangerous power technologies working "right" and being more deadly.
Nuclear power is like a rubber bullet. When it goes wrong, it can kill someone but 99.9% of the time it's phenomenally safe. Coal and Oil are essentially like lead bullets. They can kill someone each and every time they're fired, but people are used to it so they don't care.
