That's exactly the overly rosy view of the risks involved with nuclear power which make me hesitant about using it. We've tripped over our own overconfidence too many times already. We always think we can build an everything proof storage facility and there's always some unforeseen flaw which ruins the whole plan. Like I said before I'm actually not opposed to nuclear power, but I am opposed to people naively waving the risks away. If we're not going into this being wary of every step we take, it's simply going to end in disaster. In that case we better abandon it and not play with the fire we can't responsibly handle.
We should be very careful, absolutely, but exaggerating the risks is also bad. In the 60's they definitely had a overly rosy view of the risks involved. The US-airforce even wanted to build a nuclear powered bomber... talk about flying disaster waiting to happen.
Luckily it's not even technically feasible otherwise it probably would have existed today. In the 60's they also thought dumping mercury a few km off the coast was a great way to get rid of industrial waste. That was incredibly stupid, no argument there, and we are suffering for it today.
But that is not the problem now. Look at the graphs posted before: the only energy types that are decreasing are nuclear and oil. Oil because we are running out of it, nuclear because people are overly afraid of it due to all the scaremongering. We are replacing nuclear with coal, that is a
huge problem. Air pollution from coal power plants is a far far grater health issue than radiation from Chernobyl or Fukushima combined. If you extrapolate from the Swedish study I mentioned before you get that coal kills about 200k (prematurely) every year in Europe, compare that to the estimates of 30k (worst case) from Chernobyl. A nuclear power plant can blow up every year and it will still cause less health problems than the air pollution from coal does. Add to that the environmental effects from coal such as acidification and mercury poisoning, or the greenhouse gas emissions, and it should be blatantly obvious to any rational person that it is coal we should be getting rid of, not nuclear. It's not that nuclear is 100% safe, it's that the alternatives are far worse (even hydro is more dangerous).
Nuclear contamination can indeed be dangerous for tens or even hundreds of thousands of years. That's no imaginary claim, but agreed upon by those both for and against nuclear power. It's not some residual radiation either. Things aren't remotely safe after a 100 years.
Yes, as I wrote: the waste is dangerous (radioactive)
for ever, that is a given by the nature of an exponentially decreasing function: it never reaches 0. However, the radioactivity goes down quickly in the beginning, it's not constant, it's not even linear. For most of the infamous millennia the waste is only weakly radioactive. So when people claim it will be super dangerous for millennia they are being dishonest.
Besides, something being dangerous forever is common; take mercury for example, it's also dangerous for all eternity. At least nuclear waste becomes (almost) harmless after a millennia. Yet no-one is talking about the mercury storage problem.
I never said the waste is safe after a hundred years. It is not, it is still 10 times as radioactive as the fresh fuel. But think about what that means: we dig up uranium from a mine, refine it and use it as fuel. When we take it out of the reactor again it has become much more radioactive, and so we need to store it somewhere safe, a geologically stable location far underground for example. After a 100 years, it will be about 10 times as radioactive as the new fuel. But if 10% of the 100 year old spent fuel leak out into the old mine again, the net change in radioactivity in the mine will be zero! The math is simple enough. None of it should ever leak of course, containment vessels are designed to last for millennia. This is just to put things into perspective. If it did leak it wouldn't be particularly dangerous.
Of course you shouldn't store waste in a volcano, or an area with earthquakes, just like you shouldn't store other dangerous substances in a volcano. You pick a geologically stable area to store it in and then back-fill the mine so no-one gets in there by mistake. A few km under ground is far outside the biosphere, nothing living will get in contact with it. A small amount of highly radioactive solids that are stored a few km under ground isn't a threat to anyone, it really isn't a problem.
It's also true that Chernobyl was a disaster avoided. A few men prevented what used to be the core melting through the floor and reaching a reservoir of water. It's accepted that would have caused a much more massive steam explosion which would have wiped out the entire plant and led to much of Europe being heavily contaminated. "By most estimates, such a blast may have wiped out half of Europe, leaving it riskier to live in for 500,000 years." I can imagine that being unaware of both facts makes one much more cavalier in regards to the risks of nuclear power. It's hard to fear what you don't know. We danced with the devil and he threw us a bone.
It's these kind of exaggerations and scaremongering that is the real problem.
The danger with nuclear is that you get radioactive smoke particles that spread over a huge area. It is impossible to contain or clean up. That is what happened after Chernobyl. The radioactive fallout from Chernobyl rained down all over Europe (mostly here in Sweden actually). Some of the radioactive elements accumulate in crops and food animals and thus we get a tiny increase in radiation dose compared to if it hadn't happened. For the individual it isn't noticeable, you get higher dosage from a dental x-ray. But if you integrate it over all the people exposed over time (and make worst case assumptions) it's still bad since so many are affected.
I'm sure Chernobyl could have been somewhat worse if most of the fallout ended up over Europe's more densely populated areas. What does "riskier to live in" mean here (we will never know because those "may have" figures was just pulled out of someones behind) but it probably would not be riskier than living in e.g. Denver (which is naturally relatively radioactive). It's a very deceptive and misleading statement. There are people living even inside the Chernobyl exclusion zone today that never left, they are doing just fine.
The remaining reactors at the Chernobyl power-plant are still in operation today, people go there to work as we speak!(EDIT: The Chernobyl plant has been decommissioned now, sorry about that, I've read outdated information at some time. But the last reactor wasn't closed until 2000 so my point is still valid: people continued to work there for many years after the accident. It's not like you couldn't go near the site, live there or work there.)
It really was a disaster though, about 100 deaths can be linked directly to the accident and they had to evacuate the nearby town. Most of those who died were the firefighters, etc, who were first at site and who weren't informed about the risks involved by the authorities at the time. There shouldn't be any Chernobyl-type reactors anymore because they are dangerous, but iirc there still are a few in operation in the former soviet bloc. The main reason they are used is because they can produce weapons grade materials.
But even if you add the worst case estimate of premature deaths because of the increase in cancer from the fallout (commonly cited as about 30k worst case), the failure of a hydro dam can be much more devastating; like the Banqiou dam failure in China which killed 171 000. Just try to imagine what happens if the yellow river dam fails! And worst of all: coal which kills many many more people than the other two combined (200k/year only in Europe) because of the air-pollution, and it gets worse if you also consider the mercury poisoning, ghg-emissions, ocean acidification etc. I would much rather live downwind of a nuclear power plant than a coal plant (or in the valley below a hydro dam).
It should also be noted that we're still dealing with the containment of Chernobyl. We haven't fixed or cleaned a lot, we've just built another dome over it to make it go away. That's essentially the same as stuffing it in a mine. It's probably naive to think the disaster as it happened didn't claim that many victims. We know the impact was quite significant as many times more were poisoned rather than killed, and we also know the Soviet Union did everything in its power to downplay the scale of the disaster. The same applies to Fukushima. The Japanese have been diligently downplaying the scale of the disaster and we don't have any real solutions to the problems they face. They just keep on building storage tank after storage tank to store the contaminated water used to cool the reactors, but it turns out those are already leaking water. Their "alternative" if filtering it a bit and dumping it into the sea while storing the highly radioactive sludge on-site. Those are not real solutions. It's moving the problem around.
No it isn't naive, it's what years of studies have concluded.
You are right that the Japanese government covered up the full extent of the accident in the beginning, and that is very unfortunate. Because of that we can't really be sure of all of the consequences yet which is why I haven't mentioned any numbers from Fukushima. I would be surprised if it's any worse than Chernobyl, and it would have to be many times worse than that to beat the Banqiao dam disaster or the continuous poisoning from coal power plants.
It's hard to say much about Fukushima when we don't have all the facts, but at the very least, if you see it as part of the overall damages that the tsunami caused it is almost negligible in comparison.
Still, we shouldn't continue using the old light water reactor designs either. They were developed because they were convenient for nuclear powered subs and ships. There are safer designs that would have avoided the Fukushima accident. The pebble bed reactor or the thorium molten salt reactors are both more fuel efficient and a lot safer (they shut down gracefully in the event of a complete power failure). Unfortunately they never became popular because they didn't have the same military potential.
If we're not serious about the problems we're already seeing, we're just asking for some more.
The problem is we are ignoring the dangers from coal and gas. We are filtering out gnats, yet swallowing camels. It's completely irrational. Nuclear is not perfect, but it is the safest power-type we have today. (Solar and wind is great but it still can't replace coal).