Billions of dollars have been spent on the Hanford issue in particular, and so called "nuclear waste" associated with commercial used nuclear fuels, and billions more will be squandered on it.
How many lives have been saved as a result?
Very few, if any. Why is that? Because neither Hanford, a weapons plant, nor the storage of used nuclear fuel have killed very many people, if any. Now I grant you, if there is any leak at all at any nuclear facility anywhere on earth, it will be huge international news and millions of tons of coal and oil will be burned to talk about it on the internet, even if it kills no one. By contrast, the thousands upon thousands of people who die regularly from dangerous natural gas leaks will not be discussed at all, but is this rational or even ethical?
Suppose we spent the same amount of money as been spent on Hanford, the big boogey man raised by people who know very little about nuclear energy, on providing basic sewage handling services to the 2.3 billion people who lack any kind of sanitary treatment at all.
What proportion of the people who die each year from as WHO describes in the link being "280 000 diarrhoeal deaths annually and is a major factor in several neglected tropical diseases, including intestinal worms, schistosomiasis, and trachoma" would have been saved?
Which is more dangerous, used nuclear fuel, which has collected for more than half a century generating irrational fear but killing no one, or human fecal matter?
I consider, after decades of study, that every component of used nuclear fuel is extremely valuable. They are tremendous resources, even if the intellectually lazy general public doesn't get it.
You say that Fukushima is an ongoing disaster with no sign of abating. Are you therefore claiming that the seven million people who die each year from air pollution is not an "ongoing disaster with no sign of abating?"
What about climate change? It's not, um, a disaster? Which prevented more dangerous fossil fuel waste from being indiscriminately dumped into the atmosphere, all the solar and wind plants built on this planet after half a century of mindless cheering, or the 400+ nuclear plants built between 1965 and 1985 using mid 20th century technology?
Here is a comprehensive survey in the primary scientific literature of the 67 largest risks to human health and the death tolls associated with them, authored by a huge consortium of academic physicians, epidemiologists and health officials:
A comparative risk assessment of burden of disease and injury attributable to 67 risk factors and risk factor clusters in 21 regions, 1990–2010: a systematic analysis for the Global Burden of Disease Study 2010 (Lancet 2012, 380, 2224–60: For air pollution mortality figures see Table 3, page 2238 and the text on page 2240.)
How many people exactly, died from Fukushima radiation?
How many people died from drowning in surging seawater in the same event as destroyed the reactors?
Which is more dangerous, given the drownings in the events in occupied coastal city in Japan in 2011 in the Sendai earthquake and the quarter of a million people killed by a similar event in 2004 in Indonesia and the Maldives, surging seawater from rising seas or nuclear power?
In Japan, which killed more people, the explosion at the Mitsubishi trichlorosilane plant or radiation from Fukushima? The solar industry is a trivial industry that has never, not once, produced 2 of the 574 exajoules of energy that humanity was using each year as of 2015, and already dangerous intermediates from it are killing people, and, as I pointed out in this forum last night, that's only the tip of the iceberg where the solar scam is concerned.
Fast, accurate determination of cadmium contamination without expensive instrumentation.
In the last ten years we spent over one trillion dollars - money that could have done a great deal of good elsewhere - on the solar scam with the result that climate change is getting worse, not better, and still the fantasy that it is "safe" and "sustainable" and "cheap" is bandied about mindlessly in spite of obvious data to the contrary.
The assumption made by people who lazily assume that by saying the word "Fukushima" they have established that it is the worst energy disaster of all time and proof that nuclear plants are not what I regard them to be, the last best hope of the human race, is frankly nothing more than selective attention.
The great climate scientist Jim Hansen and his colleague Pushker A. Kharecha published an irrefutable paper showing that nuclear energy saves lives even accounting for Fukushima, Chernobyl, Hanford (a weapons plant by the way) blah, blah, blah, blah.
Prevented Mortality and Greenhouse Gas Emissions from Historical and Projected Nuclear Power (Environ. Sci. Technol., 2013, 47 (9), pp 4889–4895)
These fine young engineers whose site I linked are highly educated. I invite you to view the curriculum of the nuclear engineering curriculum at MIT to see how educated, in fact, they are:
NSE curriculum
This is the undergraduate curriculum.
These highly educated young people are fighting ignorance, ignorance that I note, since nuclear power saves lives, kills people.
If we had spent the same trillion dollars that we squandered on the fashionable, but dangerous (since it hasn't worked, is not working and will not work) on the pop notion that solar energy can save the day on nuclear power plants, we would have saved millions of lives among the 70 million people who died in the last ten years from air pollution.
The problem with nuclear energy is that it is a highly sophisticated enterprise that involves deep concepts that don't fit well into the pop mentality, and of course, as mentioned, selective attention.
Enjoy your Sunday.
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