Re: I'm suggesting it.
[Background, I am a Brit, with no particular prejudices against nuclear power, living in Japan, about 50km from a large nuke power station - down in Kyushu. I took supplies up to the big Kobe quake, but Fukushima was simply too far away for it to be a sensible thing to do.]
> The Fukushima nuclear "disaster" caused, erm, pretty much none.
It depends what you factor in. If you are looking at death caused directly by radiation, then what you say is probably true. (You have to reach for statistics and a fair number of assumptions about the affect of low levels of radiation to believe the contrary.)
But there is another question: how many deaths can reasonably be attributed by a rational person (attributed to - not "caused" - yes - there is a lot of wiggle room there - if you don't want to address the essence of the point, feel free to take it...) to it being a nuclear power station that was hit, rather than - say - a coal power station.
And then the answer is less clear. A large number of people have to be moved out of the exclusion zone and housed in temporary accommodation, long term. They will never see their homes again. If you are old that is EXTREMELY stressful. If you have animals, you will be parted from them. Sometimes those animals - dogs, cats, are the only thing you had in the world left to love.
There is an enormous cost to such stress - people die earlier than they would. I only have this from anecdotal evidence (I run a small animal rescue charity) - not a scientific study - but I have heard and seen enough to be persuaded that it is the case. (If the same thing happened in the UK, this would have been studied to within an inch of it life - but if there are Japanese studies I am not aware of them.)
You also have to factor in deaths that can be attributed to accidents in the cleanup. These don't have to be accidents caused directly from radiation - they just have to be deaths attributable to it being a cleanup of a nuclear accident. There are a lot of storied about what goes on up in Fukushima, and the involvement of yakuza - enough to make me skeptical of any mortality figures from the Government about mortality amongst the cleanup workers.
There is also the astronomical cost of the cleanup from the (nuclear) incident. Put that same money into hospitals or welfare - or even safety signs and speed bumps on roads - and you would save lives elsewhere. So the fact that you are cleaning up a nuclear incident, with the additional expense, has to be factored in.
One objection to the above would be: the people did not have to be moved out of the zone - radiation levels were not so high that they were a danger to health...
.. to which I would reply, that being rational and scientific about the radiation level of zone OTHER people are living in is fairly easy. But as soon as you factor in the opinions of your partner, and your kids - and your basic gut instincts as a parent, if you have sprogs, then you just consider the possibly that you might not be half so sanguine...
So - yes, there is an awful lot of gut response that may not be backed up by the science. But in a democracy, where the n hundred thousand people directly affected are voters, - and n million more sympathise them, you can't just ignore it. It become just as much something you have to factor in as the raw science.
Never underestimate the raw persuasive power on her partner of the gut instincts of a pregnant woman within 100 miles of any nuclear incident.
.. and it aint over yet. No-one here thinks it will be over anytime soon - and no-one I personally have spoken to here believes in their heart (or at least, after 2 glasses of shochu) the government's claims that it is "under control"
At the end of it all, I am gingerly in favour of nuclear power in countries in which the earth don't move, and which have robust, independent regulators. Japan has improved rather with the latter - but there is bugger all it can do about the former.