Kate Prengaman reports that despite safety fears raised by the 2011 post-tsunami meltdown in Fukushima, Japan, and the ongoing debate about how and where to safely store waste, Alan Waltar, a nuclear engineer with decades of experience at Hanford and Pacific Northwest National Laboratory concludes that nuclear power is the clean way to meet the growing energy needs of the planet.\n\n He said that Fukushima was nuclear powers finest hour. There was a 9.0-magnitude earthquake and the reactor survived. Everything worked as engineered. A 45-foot-high wall of water knocked out the diesel generator responsible for backup power to cool the reactors, causing three of the six reactors to melt down. But, most importantly, no one died.\n\nPeople were evacuated, and the World Health Organization found that as a result, no one was exposed to radiation levels high enough to increase future cancer risks. The incident shows how safe nuclear power can be if a disaster of that scale can be managed without loss of life. The earthquake and tsunami, on the other hand, killed almost 16,000 people.
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