Plutonium has not ever came as close to killing anywhere near what oil has killed, in Japan or anywhere else.

Oil waste continues to kill people continuously, and oil based weapons of mass destruction have killed millions of people since the end of the second world war.

Used intelligently, in the absence of fear and ignorance, plutonium could be utilized with the depleted uranium already mined and isolated to provide all the energy for all human needs for several centuries. This would mean no coal mines, no oil platforms, no tars sands, no fracking, no digging toxic metals in China for the expensive and useless so called "renewable energy" industry, none of that.

Regrettably, however, people who hate nuclear energy and nuclear materials on the grounds they know nothing about them at all - functioning with healthy dollops of fear and ignorance - will prevent any of this from happening and the world instead will choke to death on dangerous fossil fuel waste, a real process well under way right now, with seven million air pollution deaths each year, continuously, without interruption, and that's not even counting the tens of thousands of people who regularly die from things like heat waves:

Comptes Rendus Biologies Volume 331, Issue 2, February 2008, Pages 171–178 "Death toll exceeded 70,000 in Europe during the summer of 2003."

The mindless twittery about things like plutonium inventories has a real human cost, a huge human cost.

How long before renewables wipe out the expensive and dangerous nukes?

...in the last ten years, this on a planet where two billion people lack basic sanitation.

On this planet, we are now consuming 560 exajoules of primary energy per year. Despite massive spending and mindless cheering for this toxic adventure - solar and wind combined don't produce 5 of them. The result? The entire renewable energy industry can't even match the 63 exajoule increase in coal consumption of the last ten years, never mind the 163 exajoule total.

Typically however, the proponents of this reactionary effort to return to the 18th century, when humanity abandoned so called "renewable energy" on the grounds that most people lived short, miserable lives, couldn't care less about coal, oil or gas. They want to attack the form of energy - the only primary source of energy discovered and developed in the last 100 years, this by some of the finest minds the world has know - nuclear energy.

Here's some news for you, not from the self referential twit set repeating dangerous and tiresome rhetoric for the last half a century about nuclear energy while dangerous fossil fuel waste kills about 3.5 million every damn year - with "renewable" biomass burning killing another 3.5 million per year, but from the primary scientific literature: Nuclear energy saves lives.

Environ. Sci. Technol., 2013, 47 (9), pp 4889–4895 "Prevented Mortality and Greenhouse Gas Emissions from Historical and Projected Nuclear Power."

There are right now, close to two million lives that have been saved that would have been lost without access to nuclear energy. Nuclear energy might have saved millions more, were it not for stupidity, selective attention, fear and ignorance.

The conceit of people who know nothing at all about nuclear energy but hate it anyway is that nuclear energy should be perfect or eall other forms of energy will be allowed to kill at will. This is a very dangerous, in fact, deadly view of the world. Nuclear energy need not be perfect to be vastly superior to everything else. It merely need to be vastly superior to everything else, which, happily it is.

The contempt for nuclear energy among people who are nominally liberal is as odious and as ill considered as creationism on the right. In at least in one way is worse. Creationist views undoubtedly cause loss of life by limiting the education of people who might otherwise have become researchers or physicians, but it does not approach the death toll associated with air pollution, which has killed more than 70 million people in the last ten years, more people than died in World War II. The only effective check on air pollution in the last half a century, is the mature, scalable and remarkable nuclear energy industry.

Have a nice weekend.

...eternity. That actually kills people, not that people who raise this issue give a rat's ass for the 7 million people who die each year from air pollution.

The only thing remarkable about used nuclear fuel is that it, unlike materials from all other forms of energy, has not killed anyone. If you'd like to identify 7 million people who have died from the storage of used nuclear fuel in the last half a century, you're welcome to try, but anyone doing this would clearly lack a credible source. Note that the requested explanation compares more than half a century with a single year.

Well?

Here's a clue for you about how ridiculous the raising of Fukushima, Three Mile Island, and Chernobyl, not that I expect anyone raising these points to be anything but clueless: These nuclear failures combined, stretching over half a century of nuclear operations, will not ultimately kill as many people who will die today from the normal operations from fossil fuel plants.

About half of the 7 million air pollution deaths each year are associated with are from outdoor air pollution. A little arithmetic, something that anti-nukes are obviously unable to do, suggests that this amounts to about 10,000 people per day, every day, continuously.

I note that the people who blabber endlessly about Fukushima. Chernobyl, and even more insipidly, Three Mile Island, have no interest in abandoning cars because of oil refinery explosions, other gasoline explosions, or no interest in abandoning dangerous natural gas because of the regular and almost continuous flow of deaths from gas explosions.

Quick...how many people died in the most recent NYC gas explosion, this a week or so ago? Don't know? Don't care? I thought so.

and got to witness up close and personal the fallout from the nuclear explosions, I deeply resent your implication that people who are against nuclear power are "fearful" and "ignorant". You obviously have never experienced a situation in which ambient radiation levels in your home area zoomed up to double-digit multiples of normal levels in one day, and the government was telling you to may have to evacuate (in fact, the French government actually did convince my neighbor to evacuate). In the days, weeks and months after the explosions, my city became a destination for Fukushima evacuees, because they had to leave their homes due to the exceedingly high levels of radiation in their home towns-- levels which sometimes exceeded 200X normal levels, for months on end.

Meanwhile, there were "hotspots" in areas 100 miles or more from the reactors that persisted for months after the explosions, and some cities like Moriya, Matsudo and Kashiwa ordered soil to be removed from schoolyards, playgrounds, and other areas where children congregate if the ambient radiation level was at least 10X normal levels. Soil was removed from dozens of facilities, as I learned from numerous kids and parents who lived in those areas, as well as from the cities' respective web sites.

This sign in Moriya says, "Do not enter this area, because radiation levels exceed 1 microsievert per hour" (= 20X normal levels)



The photo below shows radioactive soil being removed from a park in Chiba Prefecture, near Tokyo. The caption reads "Parks that had had contaminated soil removed once again showed high levels of radiation, so soil had to be removed a second time. And children in northwest Chiba were not even given a health examination."