Good food. For. Thought. I think I will save some of my responses for a full article. I'm going to take some notes so I can get back to them.
The short version is that Fukushima is a catastrophe, but not just in the radiological sense. IF people want to live in an exclusion zone, there shouldn't be an exclusion zone. But because the governments of all nations are effectively driven by either high medical expenditures shared by taxpayers (centralized healthcare) or the industry is regulated by the long arm of the lawsuit (ad hoc class action lawsuits), the areas just have to be excluded. True enough, I wouldn't pick that place to live, but if my work took me there as a nuclear scientist, I wouldn't lose sleep over an elevated radioactive background, the occasional contaminated thing.
It's a bit over-the-top if you ask me. Now, Chernobyl is probably an order of magnitude worse, but even it's not the uninhabitable city that it's made out to be. If the same amount of work is done after a nuclear incident like it would be after a major earthquake or tsunami or hurricane... those places would be livable.
My point is that if this is such a global community, why not send all the displaced people to an uninhabited land and spend money on new infrastructure? But no, that's not what tax money is for... and we have international borders ... we can't just do that. So they don't clean it up, they don't allow anyone to live there, and they just want displaced people to live in some other crowded place. And since the government worked hand-in-hand with the reactor operators... You have articles like this: http://www.ien.com/safety/news/20855195/tepco-govt-liable-in-fukushima-lawsuit which would have happened sooner in the US. You see that both TEPCO and the government are being held responsible?
That's correct. It took two to tango.
Stupid people should not be in charge of nuclear safety. That has borne itself out numerous times.