Public outcry against nuclear energy was swift. In the West, the governments of Denmark, Sweden, and the Philippines promised to abandon their nuclear programs. Within a year, nine other nations either postponed or ended their plans for reactor construction. In Eastern Europe, protests against nuclear energy erupted in Lithuania and Ukraine in 1989 following policy changes from the Kremlin. Opinion polls revealed that, since Chernobyl, two-thirds of humanity opposed the further development of nuclear energy.

The Chernobyl accident is rightly terrifying. Some opponents of the technology wield the accident as evidence of nuclear energy’s profound safety risk to humans and the planet. They are wrong to do so. …

LeClear believes currently used designs are impervious to a Chernobyl-scale disaster. “With the designs out there, it’s just not possible to get what happened at Chernobyl. Even modern RBMKs that ran for a long time had major changes in the way they did things. We learned and we improved, and that’s what we do in any industry, especially in the nuclear industry.” Today, there are eight refurbished RBMK reactors still operating, including two at the Leningrad nuclear power plant just 73 kilometers west of St Petersburg.

[Three Mile Island also forced changes on the industry in the West, although that took a long while too. Modern reactor design also makes both kinds of failures nearly impossible if not outrightly so. Nuclear power can and should be a key part of our energy profile, and so should stringent oversight of these facilities. — Ed]