Well, first of all radiation is a entirely man made disaster, unlike a tsunami. And additionally I think that your wikipedia quote is a nice example, first no acute radiation syndrome fatalities is a nice statement, it is also true for the entire WWI. The thing is, that acute radiation poisoning only happens at really high doses, long after everybody should start running away. This is simply not a concern for an area where anybody is living.
Future cancer deaths from accumulated radiation exposures [...] are predicted to be extremely low to none. Yes, but I find the paragraph in the source [1]
Even the worse case scenario — a dose of 50 mSv — poses a fairly minimal risk.
However, the models showed that infants living in Namie could have got a higher
dose to their thyroid, of 100–200 mSv. That higher dose would be due mainly to
radioactive iodine-131 blowing from the plant immediately after the accident. Brenner
says a dose of 200 mSv to a female infant under a year old might mean a 1% risk of
developing thyroid cancer over her lifetime (by comparison, the lifetime risk in the
United States is 0.02%).
So if you then look into the WHO report which triggered the nature blog post [2], and especially appendix D, you will find that there was quite a lot of necessary smoothing of the data, for example, the difference between the average contamination of seafood and the maximum sample is a order of magnitude. And it is actually quite easy to construct a scenario, where consumption of a specific Tuna is a death sentence.
So I think that a argument can be made for nuclear energy, but this argument should not be "no one will ever know we killed her. <evil laughter>" The argument should include sentences like [3]:
[...] My offers were such as to give me a risk equivalent to that faced by an American soldier
in World War II, according to my calculations of plutonium toxicity which followed all generally
accepted procedures. These offers were made to all three major TV networks, requesting a few
minutes to explain why I was doing it. I feel that I am engaged in a battle for my country's
future, and hence should be willing to take as much risk as other soldiers.
> Well, first of all radiation is a entirely man made disaster, unlike a tsunami.
Tsunamis are not much of a disaster without man building and living along the coast where tsunamis may strike. The circumstances of the disaster are just as much man made as the radiation.
Future cancer deaths from accumulated radiation exposures [...] are predicted to be extremely low to none. Yes, but I find the paragraph in the source [1]
So if you then look into the WHO report which triggered the nature blog post [2], and especially appendix D, you will find that there was quite a lot of necessary smoothing of the data, for example, the difference between the average contamination of seafood and the maximum sample is a order of magnitude. And it is actually quite easy to construct a scenario, where consumption of a specific Tuna is a death sentence.So I think that a argument can be made for nuclear energy, but this argument should not be "no one will ever know we killed her. <evil laughter>" The argument should include sentences like [3]:
[1] http://blogs.nature.com/news/2012/05/world-health-organizati... [2] http://apps.who.int/iris/bitstream/10665/44877/1/97892415036... [3] http://www.phyast.pitt.edu/~blc/book/chapter13.html