From the Department of Energy

No matter what wingnuts like Anne Coulter and the industry apologists over at the Wall Street Journal op-ed page might think, the explosions, over-heating, radiation leakages and possible partial meltdowns at Fukushima Daiichi's six reactors are indeed, a very big deal. Yes, as some have pointed out, the number of people yet to die from this disaster fortunately remains at zero, much lower than the number of those who die from extracting energy from oil wells or coal mines every year. However, the potential for long-term catastrophic harm cannot be underestimated, or removed from the equation.

To that point, the New Yorker's head environmental writer Elizabeth Kolbert warns in this week's issue that despite decades of studies and regulations, the domestic nuclear-energy industry remains woefully ill-prepared to meet even a middling threat from natural causes or terrorist threat:

As the disaster in Japan illustrates, so starkly and so tragically, people have a hard time planning for events that they don’t want to imagine happening. But these are precisely the events that must be taken into account in a realistic assessment of risk. We’ve more or less pretended that our nuclear plants are safe, and so far we have got away with it. The Japanese have not.

Case in point: the only slightly agreed-upon repository for all the nuclear waste we've created so far, Yucca Mountain, is still years away from construction even being started. And being located quite near a major population center and in a geologically unstable area, it's hardly an ideal spot anyway. But, hey, let's go right ahead and build more plants before we've figured that out, right?