Well said, TT. Much is made of the risk posed by radiation, but when it comes down to the hard science, the calamity has not eventuated.

<when you stop smoking for a few years,your body recovers.These nuke elements stay with you for life>

Studies on Hiroshima survivors show that like ex-smokers, their health tends to that of unexposed persons. There is no evidence that radiation will eat away at the DNA and degrade the genome of a population. Great stuff for anti-American/anti-semitic conspiracy theories, but unsupported.

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0265931X02000413

<Apart from as regards the extreme psychological stress caused by the horrific loss of life following the tsunami and the large-scale evacuation from homes and villages, such studies have limited to no chance of providing information on possible health risks following low dose exposures received gradually over time—the estimated doses (to date) are just too small.>

http://iopscience.iop.org/0952-4746/32/1/N33

Can one of you geniuses (Is it Genii?) explain how Hiroshima and Nagasaki are now far bigger with loads more people in 2012 than they had in 1945.

All together now "We are all going to die! We are all going to die!! Send us more government funding lol! When the alarmists among you sell your homes for ten dollars I will start worrying. Anyone got a house for sale ?

JBower.Hiroshima and Nagasaki were small on comparison to the number of fuel rods stored in Fukushima.They stored 40 years of waste above the reators.They are not contained.Some say the radiation release is equivalent to 2000 attomic bombs or 10-100 times worse than Chenrobyl.They really don't know exactly and they should.

The danger is not the gamma radiation it is caesium, plutonium, uranium etc.Just because we don't see people dropping dead immediately is no reason to be complacent.Wild life there is already showing signs of birth defects.Our media is controlled by large corporate interests and the nuke industry with the $ billions to be made,will not accept responsibility or economic loss.

Arjay,

The original post was full of irrelevant statistics purely to create alarm. For example, the spent fuel rods contain 85 times the radioactivity of the Hiroshima bomb. So what? Are the tonnes of spent fuel rods likely to jump up and vaporise themselves?

Spent fuel rods are typically stored on site for about 40yrs so that the most active isotopes are expended, after which their radioactivity is 1/1000 as high as when they came out of the reactor. Only after this are they safe to handle and reprocess.

The proof of the pudding as previous mentioned is in the Tsunami that killed > 20 000 people, how many died from radiation? Zero.

The land near the plant was polluted with short half life isotopes whose activity will halve every 2.5 years, and most will be safe within a decade.

Isn't ignorance bliss Shadow Minister? You too are sprouting off about something of which you know virtually nothing.I'll listen to Arnie Gunderson a nuclear enginee with 39 yrs experience who has a patent on nuclear safety and once was licenced to run a nuclear facility.

If you studied what Gunderson was saying you would have reaslised he is not advocating shutting down all reactors.He was talking about the flawed nature of the Mark 1 boiling reactors which have over 70 holes at the bottom that during meltdown scenarios lets the radiation escape.They were built on a fault line close to the ocean.Everthing done was wrong.A friend of Gunderson resigned from General Electric in 1976 who designed them because of these faults.These corps when they see profit,cannot be trusted.

Keep sprouting your ignorance and go live there for a while and talk to the Japanese.

Amusement and despair assail me in equal proportions. The point of a debate and discussion about problems, is to arrive at solutions/ consensus/ agreement/ actions/ and so on. Yet posters usually arrive with their opinions intact, repeat their mantras ad nauseam, worm their way out of corners by switching topic or jumping to irrelevant side issues, quoting 'experts' with whom they agree. I can't remember reading any topic in which someone said they had been swayed by a good argument and had changed their mind on that issue. Belly says earlier on: "Planet 3 you come armed with blinkers of your own making." So do you, Belly, so do you. And so do all the others who think deaths of individuals from smoking and road accidents are somehow equivalent to the poisoning and slow, painful decline and death of thousands of uninvolved individuals from nuclear radiation, whether it be spectacular disasters like Fukushima, or 'depleted' uranium warheads. People are still dying from Nuclear tests on Australian soil, from the Bombs of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and although no one has been reported killed yet by the Fukushima debacle, they will die, slowly and painfully in the years ahead. Nuclear fission has been tried and found wanting. It is expensive, inherently dangerous and poses unsolvable disposal problems. Add to that the certainty that we have not yet cured human fallibility, and I remain astounded that people are still promoting a nuclear fission solution to future energy needs.