By this logic, the frog is wise to continue swimming in the slowly heating vat of water.
Is it really so stupid to look at the absolute number of deaths caused? Sure, people are a lot less freaked out by a slow rate but overall higher number of deaths in any comparison of anything. But in the long term, should we always plan based on what people are freaked out by and what people ignore? Some people are concerned about climate change, but no one is genuinely freaked out by it, the same way they are about nuclear energy. So we can manage the problem of climate change by slowly adapting our economies? What if the climate starts changing faster than we can comfortably adapt our economies (and political will)?
The problem of sustainable energy generation is more of a PR problem than a scientific one. "We the people" need to recognise that "we the people" are often wrong.
As has been pointed out, modern nuclear reactors are far safer than Fukushima. Yet the older reactors are giving the whole industry bad press - thereby causing few new reactors to be built and more base load being supplied by less-safe old reactors.
It's pretty easy to look at Fukushima and quantify the damage, including the uninhabitability of areas over time. However, a problem such as a slow rate of industrial deaths in the fossil fuel industry, and also the environmental damage caused by fossil fuels is difficult to totally quantify. Industrial deaths and injuries hold back an economy - if those deaths had not occurred, health care costs are not continually incurred, and productivity is not hit. Years down the line after an industrial death, costs are still being incurred against an economy in some way or other - some very hard to quantify - such as opportunity costs. A slow but constant rate of death almost silently gnaws away at an economy. And this completely ignores the environmental problems of fossil fuels - the end-game of climate change being increased worldwide geopolitical instability.
