The agonizing restatement of Murphy's law at the Fukushima
nuclear power plant in northern Japan threatens to delay once
again a promising expansion of our own nuclear power generating
capacity. It should prompt a check and recheck of plans and
proposals for new nuclear plants in this nation. But we question
if anyone can offer well-founded objections to nuclear plants of
improved designs in areas that are not seismically active.
Murphy's law alone, "if anything can go wrong, it will," doesn't
constitute a well-founded objection. The two previous high-
profile accidents, the catastrophe at Chernobyl and the partial
meltdown at Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania, were setbacks for
the nuclear power industry. Chernobyl, for all of the death and
destruction it caused in Europe, wasn't the same kind of lesson
as was the incident at Three Mile Island. ... The plant had few
of the safeguards in place at nuclear power plants elsewhere in
the world at the same time. Chernobyl was a catastrophe waiting
to happen. Three