Building a Better Reactor
Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, Fukushima. First the accident, then the predictable allegations in the postmortem: The design was flawed. Inspections were inadequate. Lines of defense crumbled, and reliable backups proved unreliable. Planners lacked the imagination or willpower to prepare for the very worst. There’s a way to break out of this pattern. Nuclear power plants will never be completely safe, but they can be made far safer than they are today. The key is humility. The next generation of plants must be built to work with nature—and human nature—rather than against them. They must be safe by design, so that even if every possible thing goes wrong, the outcome will stop short of disaster. In the language of the nuclear industry, they must be “walkaway safe.”
Lessons of the Spill
Poised for dramatic expansion, high-tech offshore drilling was considered ultrasafe. Then came BP’s Deepwater Horizon disaster. What the company—and the industry—must do to bounce back
The Lost Generation
The continuing job crisis is hitting young people especially hard—damaging both their future and the economy