Nuclear Regulatory Commission

Reports continued to come in Monday night detailing the third explosion to hit the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear plant in the past 4 days.The plant, located in northeastern Japan, was first ravaged by the 9.0-magnitude earthquake that hit northern Japan last week. Soon after, two hydrogen explosions caused fires that have since been contained. News of the first two explosions only worsened the public's fear of a catastrophic release of radiation into the atmosphere. According to one report, the third explosion "was heard at 6:10 a.m. local time on Tuesday, a spokesman for the Nuclear Safety Agency said at a news conference. The plant's owner, Tokyo Electric Power Co., said the explosion occurred near the suppression pool in the reactor's containment vessel. The pool was later found to have a defect."

Not good news. And while leaking radiation is a major fear, early reports still vary when it comes to just how bad the situation is. According to the TIME NewsFeed: "In a televised address to the nation at 11 a.m., Japanese Prime Minister Naoto Kan spoke of the high-pressure situation. Kan advised people within 19 miles of the affected power plant to stay indoors. According to the Associated Press, some 180,000 people within a 12-mile radius had already been evacuated. "There is a very high risk of further radioactive leaks," he said."I ask you to stay calm." Still, it has been confirmed that "radiation leaks are now severe enough to pose a significant threat to people's health"...and that's a statement from Japan's Nuclear and Industrial Safety spokesman.

The massive earthquake, which has shifted the entire island of Japan by an estimated eight feet, is truly a disaster on a global scale. It's also a disaster that has very suddenly thrust nuclear power back into the limelight...and to say the exposure has been unflattering would obviously be a gross understatement. This is the kind of disaster, on the scale of Three Mile Island and Chernobyl, that will take people—both in Japan, and elsewhere—a very long time to forget...or forgive.

Right now, the hope is that the Fukushima Dai-ichi plant will avoid a full meltdown. CBS News defines a meltdown as "when the nuclear fuel inside the reactor gets so hot, it literally melts. Uranium pellets are inside the long fuel rods. If the reactor is not cooled properly, the tubes can fall apart, with the radioactive material falling to the bottom." A description that sounds scarily like the preface to a China Syndrome-esque scenario, but CBS News has also reported that the situation at Fukushima Dai-ichi is not yet as bad as the Three Mile Island accident in 1979, and nowhere near the Chernobly tragedy: "Even with the two [update: three] Fukushima explosions, so far this is nothing like Chernobyl. In 1986, the control rods malfunctioned and the fuel rods melted down. A subsequent explosion catapulted tons of radioactive material into the atmosphere."

Three decades after the one-two punch of Three Mile Island (1979) and the Chernobyl disaster (1986) decimated the public image of nuclear power, and the American nuclear industry is still working hard to win back the public's trust. Moreover—and as David Biello points out in Beyond the Light Switch—they’ve actually done pretty well so far. In the American Nuclear Society's own words, "The nuclear industry's commitment to safe packaging and security has produced a safety record that would be difficult to match."

The ANS website goes on to describe their success in further detail, specifically citing their safety record when it comes to the transportation of radioactive materials: "Over the past 40 years, about 3,000 shipments of spent nuclear fuel have navigated more than 1.7 million miles of U.S. roads and railways.  Of all this travel, no radioactive materials have been released resulting from an accident or any other cause.  During this same period, there have been about 98 million kilograms of spent nuclear fuel shipped worldwide, with no record of any release of radioactive material."

And the public has taken notice. Stewart Brand, lifelong environmentalist and creator of the Whole Earth Catalog,  goes on record as a pro-nuclear convert in Beyond the Light Switch. Brand points to the growing threat of climate change as a major factor behind many former nuclear foes' reevaluation of nuclear power’s potential low-carbon benefits. It seems a lot of people are ready to rethink nuclear and—surprise!—the government is on board, too. In this week's State of the Union Address, President Obama singled out the efforts currently being undertaken by Oak Ridge National Laboratory to improve the efficiency of our existing nuclear plants.

Obama's praise of Oak Ridge was followed by the obligatory promise of breaking our nation’s longstanding dependence on foreign oil—check out this clip from The Daily Show for further [read: hilarious] contextualization. But Obama also stressed the importance of redirecting taxpayer dollars toward "tomorrow's" energy resources. This led to the other obligatory energy economy ‘shout-out’: green job creation. In this year's SOTU, President Obama set the new goal of generating 80% of America’s electricity from clean energy sources like wind, solar, and nuclear…by 2035. An ambitious challenge, sure…but building that much nuclear generation isn’t going to be easy. Nuclear may now be considered green, but it’s still expensive to build, and strong federal support is going to be vital.

There's one other big problem standing in the way of a nuclear renaissance; remember how the nuclear industry spent the past 30 years working to try and clean up their tarnished image? 

Nuclear reprocessing. You often see it in the news, usually related to what countries are doing it and why. Reprocessing in India and China may get more ink, but the the U.K. & France do far more of it. In the United States, on the other hand, we do not currently reprocess our spent nuclear fuel. So why not? Now that many environmentalists are reevaluating nuclear power (thanks to its status as a low-carbon fuel), many are asking just that: why shouldn't we be recycling this stuff? Almost seems like the least we can do, given the complications of mining and transporting uranium, right?

Not so fast. The fellows at The Union of Concerned Scientists aren't quite so keen on reprocessing. In fact, they're actually quite...concerned about it. As scientists. In their own words, here's what their list of major concerns boils down to:

• Reprocessing would increase the risk of nuclear terrorism.
• Reprocessing would increase the ease of nuclear proliferation.
• Reprocessing would hurt U.S. nuclear waste management efforts.
• Reprocessing would be very expensive.

Very legitimate-sounding concerns, scary-sounding, even—but not everyone would agree. After all, France and Britain seem to be doing alright and they've been reprocessing for decades. To find out more about the argument for reprocessing, we talked to CEO of Duke Energy (and Beyond the Light Switch expert) Jim Rogers.

Jim Rogers knows energy. Just this past Monday he rolled out plans for a $13.7 billion megadeal that will make Duke Energy the largest electric utility in the nation. So how can he consider something that has raised such serious concerns in the past to now be no different than "recycling"? First, Rogers addressed fears that reprocessing will create a greater risk of nuclear terrorism, saying that he finds it much easier to mitigate the risk of proliferation "in the