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The death toll from the earthquake and tsunami in Japan is horrible, and it's going to get worse. In fact, it could get a whole lot worse, if one of the nuclear power plants now on the edge of disaster actually melts down or cracks open. Either way, a huge amount of radioactive material could be dispersed in an densely populated area. It's a nightmare that a lot of us have been worried about for years.
I got my start in politics in California organizing against the construction of Pacific Gas and Electric Co.'s Diablo Canyon nuke. It was a long, sometimes brilliant, sometimes frustrating struggle. We tried to warn people about rate hikes (which happened) and about the lack of a solution for the nuclear waste (still a problem) and the immense cost ($7 billion, about 200 times as much as projected) and the potential for accidents. But the argument that I always found most compelling, even with people who sorta, kinda supported nuclear power, was this:
Diablo Canyon is built on an active earthquake fault.
In fact, it's built on a fault similar to the one that just shook Japan. The Hosgri is what's called a "thrust fault," meaning that the tectonic plates slide over each other. (The San Andreas, near San Francisco, is a slip fault, meaning the plates slide next to each other.) And the plant is perched on the edge of the Ocean.
PG&E has always insisted that the plant is built to withstand the greatest likely earthquake (about a 7.7 Richter). I don't trust the company, but let's say that's true.
It's also true that the Japanese plants (unlike, say, Chernobyl) were built to the highest standards. Japan was about as well prepared for this sort of disaster as a rich, industrized country could be. Japanese engineers are as good as any in the world, and the plants were well monitored and inspected. It's just that the experts never predicted that a quake this large, and flooding this severe, could possibly happen.
Ths thing about major industrial accidents (and I learned this years ago researching the TMI near-meltdown for a book I was writing) is that they happen not because of one bad event but because of several unpredictable events happening at once. TMI was a series of errors. The plants in Japan are in trouble because the quake knocked out power (predictable) then the tsunami knocked out the backup generators (not as predictable) and the intense flooding also fried the emergency batteries. Three systems, all reliable, all redundant -- and they all failed at once.
Oddly enough, the greatest danger to a nuke (other than a terrorist attack) is a loss of electric power. If there's no power, you can't pump cooling water into the core -- and things get nasty really fast. The overheated core produces hydrogen gas, which can explode; that makes the mess even worse. If it gets bad enough, the 4,000-degree fuel rods melt right through the concrete and steel containment facility -- and you have a catastrophic release of some of the world's most toxic material.
Could a larger-than-predicted quake on the Hosgri Fault -- combined with, perhaps, some human error of the sort PG&E is famous for, combined with bad weather and high seas -- put Diablo in the same precarious situation as the Japanese plants? Of course it could. Is there any human way to put a nuclear plant on an active earthquake fault and make sure there's zero potential for disaster? Of course not.
Now: You can argue that other forms of energy generation are also dangerous (coal miners die; natural gas facilities pollute the water etc., though I've never heard of a death from solar panels). But these things have to be discussed in terms of the disaster potential -- and the potential of a massive radiation release on the California Coast, close enough to both San Francisco and Los Angeles to cause horrendous loss of life, makes almost any odds unacceptable.
