unclear about nuclear

With the recent crisis at Japan's Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, people living thousands of kilometre away are raising their concerns over the safety of nuclear energy. Some of these concerns were shown in the form of rushing for salt at the supermarket, or grabbing sushi made with the last "safe", "uncontaminated" shipment of ingredients from Japan.

Nevermind. Let's talk engineering.
Recently I am involved in some risk assessment and management projects in the energy sector (but let's be clear that I am not a nuclear expert). Actually everything we do carries a certain risk, be it eating a fish or taking a bus. It is just that whether we want to ignore the risk or put it in bold. So what is risk? Risk is impact x likelihood. Something that has big impact but zero likelihood of happening has zero risk. Something that has no impact but happens every other second as we are speaking, has zero risk too. Then you just do the tabulation with all the risk factors. So in a way we are always taking risk!

With risk, we come up with mitigating measures (or sometimes called control measures). For example, if we don't want to choke on fish bones, we can always use 100% x-ray test to make sure we don't swallow any. That would be inhibitively expensive, but definitely do-able in terms of process, yeah? I mean, I'm not even talking about money!

What I am trying to say is, for someone to decide to plant a nuclear power station, he must have thought of all these risk and whether it is worth risking. It doesn't help to campaign against nuclear energy if you are using energy like nobody's business (read, blasting air-conditioner at full blast).

If you want to know how risky or not-risky nuclear energy is, this 1988 report from UK's Health & Safety Executive may be a good read. C'mon, nuclear is not something new, but we still get ignorant people saying things like radioactive rain will reach Singapore.