In spite of what GeorgeOB says

me too for Canada, granted i think one should be careful where they're placed

Where they're placed and how they are designed and constructed.

I doubt Georgeob has changed his mind.

I'm edging from pro to not sure.

I think I could support them under certain conditions.

The failure of two, perhaps three boiling water (BWR) reactors at the Fukushima facility is indeed a serious reactor event , comparable in seriousness to the event at Three Mile Island over thirty years ago, but this time involving two or three reactors, not just one. I believe the extent of the damage & injury will depend on the the integrity of the containment structures.

TMI was a pressurized water reactor (PWR) which has different design parameters, and a different response to a loss of coolant than does a BWR. At Fukushima the presence of spent fuel rods in the assembly above the reactor was a complicating factor as well. Though the details aren't yet clear, the presence of hydrogen explosions pretty well confirms a massive fuel element failure & meltdown - very much like what happened at TMI. In the case of TMI the containment structure held, no one was injured and even after over 31 years no impact in public health has been detected in exhaustive studies of the population - zero.

The key risk is the dispersion of fission products, some of which like iodine and cesium are absorbed by the body. If the containment structure holds this risk is extremely limited. In the case of the Chernobyl reractor there was no containment structure. About 60 people were killed immediately after the Chernobyl accident and about 150 additional thyroid and other cancers odccurred later in the surrounding population.

It is important to consider these risks relative to others already present or indeed common in our daily lives. This was a truly extraordinary event – a 9.0 earthquake (160 times the energy of Loma Prieta) is a very rare event. This one occurred just 150 miles offshore from the facility, and the resulting tsunami was both powerful and swift. Total casualties are reported as high as 10,000, including whole passenger trains that are missing with all onboard. The consequences of each of these sub events and many others will individually vastly exceed those of the reactor incidents we are discussing, Despite this the reactor events get more attention than all the others combined.

The relationship between human outrage and real risk is very complex. We ignore ubiquitous risks that we have long since stopped thinking about and overreact to those we can’t control, particularly those we can’t see or imagine well.

I've just completed some research, and you know which source of energy has caused more death, injury and destruction than any other?

Fire!

What the hell is the matter with us? Why isn't our government doing it's job and putting tighter restrictions around the use of fire?

Do you know a little kid could easily get his hands on a lighter or pack of matches and voila...fire!

Obviously the people who make vast and obscene fortunes from fire don't want even sensible restrictions on it's use, but how long are we going to allow them to kill us and destroy our homes for their personal greed?

No one is allowed to have a nuclear reactor in their living room, but millions of people have open pits in which fire burns freely, and they call them fireplaces! Death and destruction places is more like it.

Can we get serious here?