Incidentally, your remark is also very insensitive. According to the Union Chernobyl the main organization of liquidators, 10% of the 800,000 liquidators are now dead- that’s 80,000 men, and 165,000 disabled — a tremendous toll to blame on “crazy Soviets” — further just how do you know there were “no safety features”?

Further, there is still radioactive water leaking into the ocean as a result of Fukushima and the problem isn’t limited to the damaged reactors but also to the spent nuclear waste. This is an issue that exists at nearly every nuclear facility in the US and we haven’t arrived at a solution for this waste in spite of hundreds of millions of dollars being spent to try to determine if Yucca Mountain is a solution.

To cavalierly state that I should have some perspective really demonstrates that you should try to gain some perspective of your own. Did you look at the fault maps I provided? Have you read the reports about what has happened in the area around Chernobyl in the past 25 years? And perhaps most importantly can you offer any means of accurately predicting when a 9.0 quake might hit near San Onofre or Diablo Canyon?

Since no one else has these answers I’d be surprised if you did. Given this fact above all else I’d say that erring on the side of caution is a lot wiser than making decisions based upon faulty logic about how safe plants “might be” when in reality we have no idea how safe anything is under unusual circumstances.

You also have a very wrong idea about the scale of the harm when bad things do happen at nuclear plants. Truth is, they’re not that bad. They’re bad on the same scale as coal mining accidents, which happen all the time.

Three Mile Island didn’t kill anyone. The right lesson to draw is that Chernobyl was an abberation, being as it was run by crazy soviets with no safety features.