I don’t know what foolsguinea considers as “a swath” but the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone is an area of more than 1,000 sq miles (2,600 sq km) in which background radiation levels are estimated to exceed safe long term habitation levels (less than 50 mSv/yr for healthy adults, a fraction for children, elderly, or immune compromised) for somewhere between the next 20 and ‘several hundred’ years, depending on what threshold you consider to be suitable, how radiation samples are used to define trends, and the degree of confidence in the currently degrading sarcophagus that entombed Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant Reactor #4 and the subsequent New Safe Confinement building. There are additional areas between Krychow and Dobrush in eastern Belarus and western Russia that are also not safely inhabitable for long durations by children because of [SUP]137[/SUP]Cs contamination. And it was fortunate that the Chernobyl reactor was located in a remote northern corner of the Ukraine near Pripyat where its impact on industrial and urban areas was not significant and agricultural areas was modest in the overall context. A similar disaster Missouri, in prime agricultural areas, would render grain cultivation and livestock farming in those areas unviable for a substantial period of time (decades even with massive cleanup efforts).
Someone is presently going to come along and make the patent statement that “Chernobyl is like a reactor from another dimension, and that can’t happen again,” which is the stock response from blithe nuclear power advocates every time someone brings up that NES-7 event. Except the massive radiation release from the Fukushima plant was also supposed to be virtually impossible, and Japan was fortunate that the location of the release was at the middle northeastern are of Honshu where radioactive actinides were carried off into the Pacific Ocean where they would be diluted rather than across land masses where they would settle and contaminate agricultural regions. The reality is that nuclear plants, like any other surface structure, are subject to external and uncontrollable hazards which given the criticality and persistence of the effects of a catastrophic release of corium materials (not just radioactive steam as in the Three Mile Island release which was only of transient concern) have to be accounted for in risk assessment and mitigation. A single serious nuclear accident was one of the major causative elements in bringing down the Soviet Union (which was admittedly economically bankrupt, but had been so since at least the 'Sixties) and the cost of such an event in somewhere like the American Mid-West might have a total mitigation and cleanup cost in the many hundreds of billions to trillions of dollars, not to mention the economic impact and carbon footprint of cleanup efforts or the political fallout.
All of this is not an argument against nuclear power per se; it is an argument against the obtuse optimism that no catastrophe will occur because “no major accident” has ever occurred, which is a patently false premise. There is a need to consider the effects of even unlikely, “beyond worst case” and “once in five hundred year” accidents, because we are not good at either predicting the actual incidence of those events or the degree of damage they can do. One proposal from the 'Eighties involved building nuclear plants underground in abandoned salt mines and salt domes such that both the plant and wastes produced could be entombed at end of life, thus mitigating the costs and risks of dismantlement and relocating expended fuel and contaminated materials to a long term storage facility which we currently don’t have nor have any viable plan for constructing. However, while this concept is viable from a protection and containment standpoint, it is logistically challenging and there are a limited number of locations where it is physically viable notwithstanding the political opposition.
I think a better solution is to invest in and continue to develop technologies for full burn up, more compact, secure, and robust power generation systems, and developing readily deployed renewables and point-of-source carbon sequestration systems to mitigate the worst polluting power production in the near term. Short of developing nuclear fusion or some other genuinely carbon neutral power production system, we are going to have to dramatically expand our use of nuclear fission for power production, and probably as a energy source for fuel synthesis and industrial uses. But that doesn’t mean to turning a blind eye to the substantial and persistent hazards (both biological and fiscal) presented by the potential for a large scale release of radioactive material even if the incidence per facility/year is judged to be slight. When you build enough nuclear power facilities, even a slight incidence compounds to a high probability, and unless we have the foresight to look for every way to reduce the criticality of such an event we’ll be left holding trillions of dollars of liability when it occurs.
Stranger
(See? Not all renewable proponents are the same!)