In reply to thesaunter:
I can see both sides of the argument.
Bringing Hiroshima, (why does everyone forget poor old Nagasaki?) into the argument is a red herring. It was a nuclear weapon specifically designed to cause mass destruction. That said, the casualties were overwhelmingly due to conventional,(blast and thermal burns), effects. Radiological effects were minor in comparison. If you'd been stood a mile or so away from ground zero at Hiroshima, (and survived the fireball and devastating shockwave), you'd have got the equivalent dose to a full body CT Scan, which people don't think twice about. Hiroshima and Nagasaki aren't desolate wastelands, and Godzilla and 40 foot spiders don't stalk the land.
Likewise a lot of the low dose effects are massively overplayed. The linear no threshold model is patently wrong, (this is the model used by Greenpeace et al in the 'Chernobyl killed 10 million kiddies' articles). This adds to the spiralling costs and decomissioning problems. You wouldn't expect the workshop down the road to spend 10 million quid on a bespoke guard on the circular saw to stop YTS Brian chopping his little finger off, but the nuclear industry has to do the equivalent. Consequently they obsess over trivial minor doses and lose sight of what's actually important to safety.
And breathe..
Now the bad news.
Every nuclear reactor ever built has been state-of-the-art, foolproof, 'we know all the hazards and we've designed them out' jobs. Take the next 3rd generation PWRs. Yes, they're much safer than the earlier BWRs, (Chernobyl, Fukushima). However because they're pressurised there's addition stresses on the cooling system, and we all know what happens when you lose cooling. Yes there's all sorts of redundancy, and you can fly a plane into it etc, etc. You're still reliant on the subcontractor's subcontractor welding it up right, and the executive whose million dollar bonus is riding on delivery milestones not thinking 'It'll be right' when he hears about a few blemishes found during QA of the pressure vessel. Also let's not think about that counterfeit chip made by chinese orphans and trained orangutans that's been introduced way down the supply chain and is now sat in your massively complex safety system. Nothing is foolproof to a sufficiently committed fool.
Also we have terrorism. Paddy and Shamus had a vested interest in fallout not landing on the Bogside, Mohammed and Jamal don't really give a shit as long as they get their 72 raisins and the dirty kuffir dogs get some payback. You can do a lot of damage if you plummet a hijacked Ryanair flight in the right place. It certainly won't be anything like the magnitude of Hiroshima, but it doesn't have to be. Statistically speaking it won't kill anything like the numbers of people that the National Coal Board did, but mass panic, fears of 3 headed babies and 40 foot spiders and mass evacuations will do untold damage.
If we decide to proceed with nuclear new build, which we have to if we want to keep the lights on, we have to be prepared for these scenarios. Nothing is 100 percent safe. From wiki:
"The EPR has a design maximum core damage frequency of 6.1 x 10-7 per plant per year"
(I love probabilistic safety assessments, I'm sure you can knock up a fault tree that gives you that level of accuracy..).
The BBC, ITV etc would translate that to "Happens less than once in a million years!" like they did for the "Once in a thousand years" tsunami that hit Fukushima.
Alternatively you could note that figure is 'per plant', and if you build 600 across Europe, (all perfectly built precisely to the the design spec), you're down to a 1 in 100,000 chance of one going bang in any given year. (If anyone from the media is reading this, that's not 'Won't happen for another 99,999 years). Factor in an order of magnitude increase to allow for dodgy welding, lack of maintenance, general numptiness and we're down to 1 in 10,000 per year. That's about 10 times less likely than the Fukushima tsunami. Note that's the probability of the tsunami. They wouldn't have had a meltdown if they had got power back, and they'd have done that easily if the tsunami hadn't floated the diesel tank for the backup generators into the gap between two hills where the access road to the site went. What are the odds of that?