Bloomberg Businessweek
March 23, 2011, 7:03 PM EDT
by Gwyneth Cravens

Amid all the hysteria about nuclear meltdowns and radiation poisoning, here’s something to consider: U.S. commercial reactors have never caused a single death.

Worldwide, nuclear power has the lowest accident rate based on the amount of energy generated by any source. Compare that record with the havoc caused by dam failures and the disease and deaths wreaked by fossil-fuel pollution and explosions.

Because uranium provides so much energy relative to its mass, the volume of reactor fuel is small. The roughly 70,000 tons of nuclear fuel from many decades of delivering trillions of kilowatt-hours of power could fit in a single Best Buy store. If the fuel were recycled, as is done in France, the residue could fit in the TV department...read more