It will end as all civilised societies ended: with a collapse. I call it Tainter's Law. It ends by the diminishing return on additional investment in additional complexity. The difference to earlier collapses is the fact, that today 500 nuclear reactors will blow its nuclear inventory around the northern part of the planet as soon as nobody will cool them anymore.
This is a rediculous idea. Again, nuclear power industry accidents across all of the history of the world do not exceed the amount of radioactive material that is launched into the atmostphere by the worlds coal plants in a single year,
and we have been burning coal for almost 200 years, and seriously powering industry with it for over 100 years. Modern nuke plants don't really 'blow', and even if 100 of them had leakage accidents similar to what happened in Japan (very, very unlikely) we still wouldn't exceed what humanity has already dosed our environment with over the past 100+ years. That plant had a quadruple redundant emergency cooling system, which we now know isn't quite good enough for a 1:10K year tsumami wave. It's certainly more than enough for a global economic breakdown,
Dream on! (your ridiculous dreams).
Fukushima blew out a significant part of its inventory. In case of a black out of the whole power grid, which is a question of
when but not of
if (sun storm, economic collapse and panic/revolution etc.), it would have blown out its inventory totally, and so would have all the other reactors. Power grids become more and more fragile to maintain the 50 Hertz, totally depending on the computerised, hypercollectivised communication system.
Societies collapse, because societies are problem solving societies (Tainter). Each solved problem increases the complexity in the system, and increased complexity generates diminishing returns until the end (bifurcation point), when additional investion in additional complexity generates negative returns. Forget at least the northern part of this planet if this society will not end the nuclear industry.
Probably it won't, because society means collective stupidity, which until today always ended collapsing. This society will also end abruptly in a worldwide, globalised panic with worldwide bank 'holidays' and nobody will go to work anymore; not to the banks and not to cool the nuclear reactors. Nuclear reactors need each other to cool them, but after a black out you'll have to cool all of them. The collective stupidity will not be able to do this.
You obviously don't have an accurate understanding as to what actually went wrong with that reactor in Japan. That reactor was designed with a multiplely redundant emergency cooling system. It was specificly designed to suffer an earthquake of a power of 9.0 on the Riecther scale within 20 miles or so of the epicenter. It was desgned to suffer through a tsunami. It was designed to suffer though a complete failure of grid power support, as well as total failure of all of the AC water pumps. What was never considered was the incredible odds that all of these things would happen in the same day. It was a harsh lesson learned, and many heroic engineers and techs working for a
private company lost some or all of their remaining lifespans in concerted efforts to save public lives. It sucks to be that tech, when that crap happens at your plant; but just like joining the military, they knew what they signed up for. If you don't thik that there are equally heroic corporate employees of every other nuclear powerhouse in the world, then you don't really understand why these men and woman get paid the salaries that they do. But know that the nuclear industry knows that such a one in ten thousand odds event can happen, they are already reconsidering their own emergency cooling plans because reglatory agencies require them to and because they don't ever want to be the next set of guys to have to die to save humanity. For that matter, the complete breakdown of civil society is one of the most common emergency scenarios that nuke plant disaster planners have long considered, and one of the easiest for them to plan for. It's way harder to plan for a 35 foot high tsunami wave. Fukushima power plant had diesel powered pumps that could run underwater, and generators that could survive an earthquake; but not both at the same time. And furthermore, none of those failues would have mattered at all, had Fukushima not been involved in their once in a three year refueling cycle when the bovine fecal matter made contact with the rotating cooling device. The other reactors were all automaticly in emergency shutdown stage 60 seconds after the earthquake was detected, and never caused any problems; but that one (number 4, IIRC) was not set for automatic shutdown due to being involved in a fuel rod exchange that very week. Fresh, hot fuel rods were waiting in the storage pool, while engineers and tech were running all over a damaged and dangerous reactor trying to get the emergency neutron sheild down into the remaining core, and everyone managed to forget about the storage pool. The water in the storage pool evaporated enough that the tops of the fuel rods were exposed to air, and then they caught on fire due to their own internal heat. It was not really a 'mealtdown' in any practical sense, but radioactive smoke is no small thing. To the best of my knowledge, Fukushima could still be in operation today, if the populist government had not halted
all nuclear power in the nation, as teh damage to the reactor itself was not really significant. Nothing like Chernobel for example, or even Three Mile Island (which didn't actually release any radiation BTW, but did damage the reactor)