But mankind can handle the responsibilities that come with geoengineering, such as just heating up the globe? Because that's what we've been doing for the past century.
Fukushima taught the cynical lesson that overreaction to and media-fueled mindless panic about nuclear incidents causes more damage and death than nuclear incidents themselves.
"Nuclear is no free lunch", but you get to pick what you eat for the money you have. When you compare fossil fuel burning, which involves mining and shipping stupendous quantities of fuel and releasing equally stupendous amount of CO₂ pollution (including radioisotopes!) into atmosphere, to nuclear power, which involves mining, shipping and using tiny amounts of fuel for the same energy output, and the result is a tiny amount of solid waste... well, nuclear is a no-brainer here.
"Fukushima taught the cynical lesson that overreaction to and media-fueled mindless panic about nuclear incidents causes more damage and death than nuclear incidents themselves."
Yes, but did we really take that lesson to heart? Because one can react to that in different ways. Currently I'm leaning to towards, that yes, maybe I can be confident nuclear can be engineered to (for the money we have) acceptably safe. But I'm not convinced we can manage the social cost and education effort and corruption mitigation needed. Damage and death caused by panic is still damage and death.
People forget that the real tragedy with "fukushima" was the tsunami, the nuclear thing is a minor part of that. Seriously, over 20 000 people died from the tsunami and countless more doesn't even have a home anymore. But the fact that some people will not be able to move back to their homes are the real tragedy?
Tsunamis mankind didn't create, so I think the feel is a bit different. Even though deaths from that is also our own responsibility in as far as we could have prevented them. (Building codes, zoning, early warning systems etc.)
But there is a lot of suffering involved with whole communities being erased and ghost towns - sometimes for no great reason. Some places didn't receive much of any radiation but are now dead. Even places where it's allowed now to move back to, people don't want to. Some are afraid, and some don't want to move back to an empty ghost town.
Yes, it is different. But the losses or direct consequences are not.
We are literally about to turn the whole planet into something equivalent to what people are afraid of just because of fear loosing some small communities. It is that absurd.
But then I found my answer - it doesn't matter. The Christian dogma for instance is, no we don't but God wants us to survive despite that we don't deserve it.
If you don't care for that, we will survive or not survive and either of these outcomes will be completely orthogonal to whether we deserve to survive or not.
Alternative for those not subscribing to any particular religion: we prove we're worthy of survival by surviving. If we actually figure our way out of this conundrum, go us!
While I have not been there myself the consensus is that the effective radiation dose in the area was low. Wikipedia has 5 citations backing this statement:
Risks from ionizing radiation
Although people in the incident's worst affected areas have a slightly higher risk of developing certain cancers such as leukemia, solid cancers, thyroid cancer, and breast cancer, very few cancers would be expected as a result of accumulated radiation exposures.
Sure, why not? According to data from Wikipedia and e.g. this[0] compared to the handy reference chart[1], I should expect 2-3 times the background radiation, and at worst (at ~110 mSv/year), I'm barely hitting the lowest rate linked to increased cancer risk. Assuming I avoid the hottest spots, I should be entirely fine.
(That does not take into account the possibility of suffering extra radiation damage and chemical poisoning from ingesting radioactive elements, but this becomes manageable through thoroughly washing the living area and possibly not growing any food on contaminated soil.)
Fukushima taught the cynical lesson that overreaction to and media-fueled mindless panic about nuclear incidents causes more damage and death than nuclear incidents themselves.
"Nuclear is no free lunch", but you get to pick what you eat for the money you have. When you compare fossil fuel burning, which involves mining and shipping stupendous quantities of fuel and releasing equally stupendous amount of CO₂ pollution (including radioisotopes!) into atmosphere, to nuclear power, which involves mining, shipping and using tiny amounts of fuel for the same energy output, and the result is a tiny amount of solid waste... well, nuclear is a no-brainer here.