Ever blow up nuclear reactors in SimCity just to see if you could fix the mess?

Funny you should bring up Fukushima. Thousands died from the tsumani. Not a single person was killed by the plant failure.

As to your fantasy of 'an entire region unihabitable' - you're been reading too many green fantasy stories. Chernobyl is a natural paradise today. The claims of damage are now widely accepted by scientists to have been inflated by orders of magnitude. Far, far greater harm is now known to have been done by the forced removal of the population than by the original meltdown.

This is very simple - I'll explain it so even you could understand it, if you'd let yourself. You've said you have kids? Which would you prefer - to see your child dead from eating organic sprouts, or to see them living near Chernobyl right now, where birds sing? C'mon Mom, what's your priority?

Call me when a severe earthquake and a tsunami are threatening to hit the Pilgrim plant within a couple of hours of each other. In the meantime, I'll be over here, in the real world, where our options for large-scale power generation are nuclear and coal, and where coal kills more people every year under normal operating conditions than a nuclear plant does in a full-scale meltdown.

I'm right there usually with the environmental causes, but science trumps earth-friendliness - we can make *much* safer reactors now than there were in the past, but fear of the past...indeed, fear of things that never even directly impacted Americans...has kept us confined to a slow death by coal.

Natural gas-sourced power is a stopgap measure, but it's makes us the toad in the pot of water. Nuclear will solve the bulk of the needs, while solar/wind/geo can be used where feasible.

Self-terminating reactors like thorium/molten salt designs (which can consume those spent fuel rods!) are what we should be pursuing since they'll give us far better efficiency/scalability while we can work on improving solar designs for the future. They produce useful byproducts that won't require fifty houses of congress to decide where to put it.

Windfarms too, but at least we can put thorium reactors in places that won't offend anyone's pristine waterfront views.