Japan earthquake and nuclear crisis

The End of Japan as an Industrial Power?

How does radiation travel, and what kinds of damage can it do?

U.S. Flights Over Plant Gather Crucial Data

It's Not Your Imagination: The Number Of Disasters Just Keeps Rising

Look What Uncontained Nuclear Meltdown Did To Chernobyl

Do We Really Need Nuclear Power?

A report by environmentalists isn’t going to convince everyone we don’t need nuclear energy. So, late last year, two engineering professors, Mark Jacobson of Stanford and Mark Delucchi of University of California Davis, published two papers in Energy Policy offering their own detailed analysis of how the world could get 100 percent of its electricity from existing renewables—mostly solar and wind—by 2050. The task would be staggering. We would need nearly four million five-megawatt wind turbines—i.e., turbines twice as big as those currently on the market. (China just built its first five-megawatter last year.) Plus 90,000 large-scale solar farms—for reference, there are only about three dozen in existence now. Plus 1.7 billion three-kilowatt rooftop solar systems—that is, one for every four people on the planet. But it’s doable. The main challenge, the authors found, would be mining enough rare-earth metals—like neodymium—for all those electric motors. So, again, mind-blowingly hard, but it’s at least possible to go carbon-free without nuclear (or algae). What’s more, the world wouldn’t have to pay that much more for energy than it does today. 

Japan’s Nuclear Problem Explained in an Easy to Understand Video

How does radiation travel, and what kinds of damage can it do?

Why a nuclear reactor will never become a bomb

Japan’s Meltdown and the Global Economy’s

Each case — a collapse of house prices and a cascade of problems threatening a large release of radiation — was viewed as so improbable that it could be virtually ignored in considering risks. Those who counseled otherwise were viewed as alarmists. 

What was not considered sufficiently, perhaps, is just how serious an unlikely risk may be. If it is bad enough, the risk may not be worth taking, no matter how good the odds. There is a reason people do not play Russian roulette, even if the odds are highly favorable. It is a game you lose only once.