> Because its so simple as saying, "the wind COULD have blown the fukushima fallout southwards over Tokyo instead of relatively promptly into the Pacific." A nuclear accident COULD deliver fallout to a highly populated area that cant be evacuated in time.

So the thing that actually happened with Chernobyl then, not something significantly worse than that.

> re: desalination - fine then, add the cost of desalinating salt water to replace the increasingly scarce resource that nuclear plants evaporate, to their already uncompetitive cost.

Evaporating the water is how you desalinate it. It starts as seawater, it evaporates, you recondense it as fresh water. The equipment needed to do that costs less than the value of the water; the major expense is generating the heat which you're already doing for power generation. So I guess we could subtract the net profits from producing that valuable side product from the cost of the power generation, sure.

Do we then get to add the costs of climate change to the cost of burning coal, or are we only attempting accurate accounting for nuclear and not anything else?