You've got to hand it to the Greens -- 6,000+ people dead or missing, but that's not worth mentioning. That can't be blamed on anyone (except maybe Mother Gaia). But a series of nuclear breakdowns that have killed a reported one person and with little further chance of harming anyone? That's worth screaming about. That can be dropped on somebody.
There are plenty of questions concerning the Fukushima reactor breakdowns. For one, if I were living in Japan, I would like to think that reactors would be isolated from subduction zones. But that's not the kind of question the Greens and associated media are asking. The rhetoric they're using is designed to make the disaster seem much worse than it is, to find someone to pin things on, and to shift public opinion in the direction of shutting down all nuclear plants no matter what the circumstances. (Germany has already shut down seven of its reactors for the next four months, just in case there's a magnitude 9 earthquake in Stuttgart.) Anybody who was around for Three Mile Island back in 1979 or Chernobyl in 1986 will recognize the cycle: first hysteria, then accusations, then more hysteria, then demands to return to the pre-modern era.
First, let's put the accidents in context: the Fukushima reactors survived one of the worst earthquakes in the historical record without breaking down catastrophically. This is a compliment to the designers (GE, in case anyone was wondering), the construction crews, and the operational teams. If the same had been true of Three Mile Island and Chernobyl, the accidents that occurred at those sites would have been of interest only to specialists. (Remember that TMI had a critical set of coolant valves put in backwards, while the Chernobyl reactor had no containment structure and was deliberately red-lined with all the safety features shut down, for reasons never adequately explained.)
Clearly, to imply that the Fukushima accidents are representative of current developments in nuclear power is similar to claiming that car safety has remained unchanged since the Model A. This is how the Greens want it -- keep in mind that goal of the environmental movement is not to develop new sources of power, but to accustom Americans to far lower levels of energy use than prevail today. Unfortunately, it's up to conservatives to get the information across, and conservatives are not very good at tech. (A mystery, when you consider how many engineering types conservatism attracts. Maybe we need to develop a tech debate squad to handle these matters.)
