I think you misunderstood what was written:

The Katsurao village official said about 337 square kilometers of land in seven Fukushima municipalities are deemed “difficult-to-return” zones. Of those, just 27 square kilometers in six of the same municipalities are specified reconstruction zones.

27 km² are the worst areas. The other 310km² are still "difficult-to-return".

At what point am I supporting coal? Totally irrelevant

I'm saying Fukushima was an ecological disaster. Thankfully very few people died, but to only focus on that minimises the impact of the event. If you're going to say Fukushima wasn't that bad, you can't just cherry pick at the impacts.

Is nuclear better than fossil fuels? Yes. But that was an argument for the 80s. The time for nuclear was 50 years ago. It didn't happen.

what do they call all the waste mining material? The kind of shit that they leave in huge piles, to get rained on, which leeches all kinds of fun shit into the ground?

oh right, they call them tailings. Surely we've never seen mass ecological fallout from tailings getting into, let's say, a river.

They need cooling water, so "on the coast" is a reasonable location. Or do you mean "not in Japan"? A country without many great options for clean energy generation. Frankly Japan is one of the places nuclear makes sense to me. There's not many options.

It doesn't make sense to me in the US where there's a sunshine belt across the country 5 timezones long, large windswept plains and shallow coastlines. The US is rich in options and nuclear falls down the list.