My support of nuclear as one of our choices, although luke warm, has been expressed in Running on Empty and in these blog pages. The recent melt down in Japan, now being called almost as serious as Chernobyl, has made us all spooked about nuclear. Yet even the Chernobyl accident affected relatively few people.

The UN Scientific Committee on the effects of Atomic Radiation (Unscear) reported that at Chernobyl, 134 suffered acute radiation syndrome and 28 died soon afterwards. Nineteen others died later, but generally not from diseases associated with radiation. Another 87 suffered complications including four cases of cancer and two of leukemia. In the general population there have been 6,848 cases of thyroid cancer among young children, arising "almost entirely" from the Soviet Union's failure to prevent people from drinking milk contaminated with iodine 131. Otherwise they found no persuasive evidence of any other health effects in the general population that can be attributed to radiation exposure. People living in the countries affected today "Need not live in fear of serious health consequences from the Chernobyl accident."

A vigorous discussion about this subject between George Monbiot, a British environmentalist and writer with the Guardian, and Helen Caldicott, the world's most vocal anti nuclear critic appears in Monbiot's blog.

Admittedly new nuclear plants are very expensive, but our addiction to fossil fuels is so pervasive that we will need every possible resource to bridge the gap between them and renewable clean fuels to power our modern world. New technology has produced new safer types of nuclear plants than those 40 year old plants used in Japan. Meltdowns of the type at Chernobyl, and Japan are highly unlikely. Go to www.Monbiot.com to read more about it.

In Running On Empty, my book which is available on this website, I refer to a possible problem with cooling nuclear plants at times when they may be needed most.

I was referring to normal operation of nuclear plants, not a catastrophic meltdown. An earth quake in Japan this past week has provided us an example of the absolute worst case scenario of what can happen when Murphy's law kicks in and everything goes wrong.

On December 22, 2008, a holding pond for coal ash at the Kingston, Tennessee, coal fired power plant, the nations largest, breached the levee allowing 5.4 million cubic feet of toxic ash to flow into a nearby river, onto two dozen homes and covering 300 acres. The Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) that operates the facility has already spent $143 million on cleaning up the spill and current estimates could top $933 million, and possibly going as high as $1.2 billion. There are hundreds of similar plants  around the nation with holding ponds for toxic sludge that are potential time bombs. Who do you think will be paying the tab for this clean-up?...