For much of my life, I loved the idea of nuclear power. The science was so cool, futuristic and complicated, the power plants so vast and majestic. I devoured science fiction novels like "Lucifer's Hammer," where a plucky nuclear entrepreneur restarts civilization after a comet almost wipes us out. I thought of accidents like Three Mile Island and even Chernobyl as stumbling blocks to a nuclear future.
Then, in 2011, two things happened. First, a tsunami knocked out the Fukushima No. 1 nuclear plant, forcing a mass evacuation and costing Japan vast sums of money. Second, I learned that progress in solar power had been a lot faster and steadier than I had realized. I started taking a closer look at whether nuclear was really the future of energy. Now I'm pretty convinced that my youthful fantasies of a nuclear world won't come true anytime soon.
Safety is part of the problem — but a much smaller part than most people realize. The Fukushima nuclear crisis caused an enormous area to be evacuated. But recent research shows that the reaction might have been overdone — radiation levels for people exposed to the leak was substantially less than many had thought.