Have we gotten to the point where the Fukushima disaster has caused as many deaths as an equivalent megawattage of coal powerplants operating over Fukushima's lifetime would have?
Ok, so the lifetime output of the plant is 188 GW-years. Most estimates for the expected cancer deaths due to radiation are around 120. The evacuation itself caused 46 deaths due to disruption in medical care and suicide.
That means that Fukushima had .88 deaths per GWyr. That's 1/3 the death rate of coal according to an EU study, but twice the death rate of coal according to another study that looked at a different set of countries. Which I guess makes sense, most coal related deaths are going to be due to mining safety and particulate emissions which rich countries can do a lot to combat by investing in technology for safer money and scrubbing coal emissions.
So depending on the accuracy of the estimates - which may be drastically low, but also should be spread amongst the plants currently running without incident and their likelihood to continue that way - nuclear could end up being far more damaging to human health than coal for an equivalent amount of energy.
Well, the .88 deaths per GWyr is just for Fukushima. If you're talking about all nuclear power you have a lot of reactors that didn't have any problems but also Chernobyl, which was really very bad. So the global number is actually .1 for nuclear in general, historically. In the long run I expect both nuclear and coal to get safer.
I would say that in general we shouldn't be blind to the fact that nuclear power has serious problems, but we should also be aware that coal and oil have even more serious problems. In the long run we ought to be thinking of ways we can get by on renewable energy.
I guess this does not include all the radiation that we are still going to have, for decades and possible bigger damages yet to come: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6232104
