You seem to imply they were unwarranted, which the article you cite does not corroborate. "Several nuclear related accidents and cover-ups" do in fact perfectly justify public suspicion (which you call hysteria) and stricter regulation, even if this implies additional costs. This is not specific to the nuclear industry.

And where does it say that this was because of anti-nuclear activism? Looks to me this could very well and in fact much more plausibly due to simple financial reasons.

This argument is misleading at best since toxicity of radioactive elements is incomparable depending on whether the exposure is internal or external. External typical rock radioactivity is probably negligible. Internal exposure of aerosoled U238 is markedly more dangerous.

I don't believe that, and I think you are deluding yourself at best, dishonest at worst. The reason if much more probably because it's more profitable to let things go this way.

Not really, Fat Man converted about 20% of it's Pu load into energy; also of lot of radioactive elements were probably produced by the encasing during the explosion.

That's most certainly the point. Fat Man contained 6kg of plutonium. Tepco estimates that about 68 tons of fuel melted in Fukushima reactor no 1 alone.

You need to differentiate between internal and external exposure. Bragging random bullshit about nuclear energy is not going to help it.

You can get a patent for clicking once on a mouse button.

Care to elaborate?

Yes and you're probably part of the 1%, amiright?

I read also that one of the reason to put them on the quake-threatened east coast rather than on the seismically more quiet west coast was that the dominant winds blowing eastwards meant that normal gaseous radioactive emissions were to be blown over the Pacific ocean rather than over populated areas. And it happened that during the Fukushima accident, the winds blowing mostly offshore did in fact prevent a much more serious outcome.

Is that true, or is it another fallacious argument aiming at representing nuclear industry as the poor, benevolent guy trying his best to go good but being thwarted by crazy, enraged, hateful, irrational, almighty hippies, luddites and joe-six-packs? Honest question here. I have a hard time figuring out how a bunch of idealist activists did prevent the development of safer nuclear reactor designs and, if they were so powerful as to be able to do that, how were people demonstrating in the streets by the thousands all over the world incapable of preventing the Iraq invasion for instance? This just doesn't cut it.

My feeling is that there is at least as much lies, blindness and dishonesty on the proponent side of NP than on the opposing side. In any case the condescending, contemptuous attitude towards NP skeptics that is so common here on slashdot in particular makes me strongly think that the issues at hand are definitely not as simple and clear-cut as the nuclear fanatics would like to make it appear.

Some reactions were truely priceless though. On March 16, 2011, AnonGCB (1398517) wrote:

Well, containment chamber indeed! To which kannibal_klown (531544) answers:

I guess this courageous gentleman has bought some cheap real estate and moved to Fukushima since. Or perhaps not?

Pretty bad it seems since the posts in question were submitted after the first two major hydrogen explosions. In fact this level of blind faith in nuclear technology, akin to crazy religious bigotry, might be one of the reasons these accidents (Chernobyl, Fukushima) happened in the past, and probably will again in the future.

The number of direct radiation deaths is one way of assessing the risks associated with the technology, but not necessarily a very reliable one. What I found notable about The Fukushima disaster is that things went for a while inches away from possibly destroying Japan as a country it seems - imagine a situation where the greater Tokyo area would heave had to be evacuated for a couple of months for instance.

Simpler reaction: make this illegal. If you do this you're with the terrorists/child molesters. Case closed.

Or worse to some well-known (Guantanamo, Abu Graib) or lesser-known American one.

Or simply use a Truecrypt hidden volume.