We’re getting close to perfect failure. When the crisis has passed, the Japanese should probably ask themselves why anyone thought building nuclear plants near fault lines was a good idea. NYT:
“It’s way past Three Mile Island already,” said Frank von Hippel, a physicist and professor at Princeton. “The biggest risk now is that the core really melts down and you have a steam explosion.” (Emphasis mine)
The American standard for relating to nuclear accidents, TMI was actually a rather small incident. After Chernobyl, we were told that American nuclear energy was much safer; but no one engineers like the Japanese, and the failsafes are still failing.
I live a few miles from Brown’s Ferry Nuclear Power Plant. I also live fairly close to the New Madrid fault line. It can happen here, and if it does it will have seemed just as safe as those Japanese reactors did.
