Permit me, if you will, a bit of personal history on how I came to be suspicious of Tennessee’s current approaches to energy. When I was a senior at Penn State University, a representative of student government called me and warned that I might be needed to help prepare my dorm for evacuees from Harrisburg. That moment occurred at the height of uncertainty over the partial nuclear core meltdown at the nearby Three Mile Island nuclear plant.
There have been scary nuclear accidents both before and since Three Mile Island. The book “We Almost Lost Detroit” details the little-known story of the 1966 partial meltdown of America’s first commercial breeder reactor in Michigan. In 1986, Chernobyl reactor No. 4 exploded in Ukraine, then part of the USSR, sending a dangerous radioactive plume over parts of Europe. Studies differ on how many people were diagnosed with cancer as a result of the fallout, but most put the number in the thousands. A 19-mile exclusionary zone soon was established around the remaining mess.
In March 2011, a massive earthquake and resulting tsunami caused hydrogen-air explosions in three Fukushima, Japan, reactors and additional damage in a fourth. At least 164,000 people were displaced from the area. Yet, for all the drama from nuclear accidents, the bigger threat may be from nuclear-fission radioactive waste, some of which remains lethal to dangerous for 100,000 years…