Comment by Reason077

The costs of cleaning up Fukushima, including the wider effects on the Japanese economy, are estimated to exceed US$200 billion. That makes it a pretty EPIC disaster in economic terms alone.

Even Chernobyl was not really that bad in terms of lives lost. Even taking the worst estimates of long-term deaths from radiation exposure, it killed a tiny fraction of the numbers of people who have died from hydroelectric disasters or from exposure to coal power plant pollution. But that doesn't mean it wasn't a catastrophic disaster for the regional (and wider Soviet) economy.