From an op-ed today in the Lynchburg News & Advance:

it’s been a quarter of a century since the Soviet Union’s reactor at Chernobyl experienced a meltdown. And was on March 28, 1979, that the Three Mile Island disaster occurred in Pennsylvania. Those two incidents, coupled with the ongoing emergency at Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station, make a total of three — three — major incidents in three decades.

Nuclear reactors have been safely generating power around the world for more than four decades, and for any other industry, three disasters in more than 40 years would be a safety record to be envied.

But today, many people in the general public, environmental activists and timid politicians are wringing their hands over the future of the nuclear industry, which was experiencing a “renaissance” just eight days ago.

The public needs to calm down; the environmentalists need to quit trying to make political hay of a grave crisis; the politicians simply need to grow a spine.

In an excellent editorial in The Australian, Barry Brook and Martin Nicholson, climate change scientists, make the case for nuclear power as an essential component of any climate change plan. To those who think high-profile incidents that took place twenty years ago or more make nuclear power unsafe, they talk about new safety technologies and note:

Comparing the flawed Chernobyl design to today’s reactors is like saying modern aviation is too dangerous because the Hindenburg airship exploded in 1937.

The entire editorial is really worth a read.