Higginbotham: On one hand, I think radiation by its very nature – invisible, odourless, tasteless, intangible, potentially lethal – can seem a terrifying phenomenon, even though many of us don’t give a thought to the tiny doses of radiation we receive from the world around us every day. The complexities of the linear no-threshold model of radiation exposure and lifetime risk calculations can make it a struggle not to glaze over in confusion or boredom. Yet the way they’re presented to, or misinterpreted by, the public can have a terrible impact in the real world, as with the spike in abortions that reportedly took place in Western Europe in the months after the Chernobyl explosion. On the other hand, the nuclear industry can also use such complexities to conceal and obfuscate the dangers of its technology – merely the changes in the units used to measure radiation doses in the press over the years make it extremely challenging for non-scientists to compare the effects of Chernobyl with Fukushima. Even after all the accidents you describe, and the opportunities to learn from them, do you think that there are currently U.S. nuclear plants where there remains a risk of a disaster on the same scale as Chernobyl?

Jaczko: The risk of an accident is there for every commercial power plant in the U.S. The plants are different, so the radiation releases would not necessarily be as large as the release from Chernobyl but still could be substantial. And because the accidents are to a certain degree random, you can not predict exactly where and when one will happen. The industry uses that fact, too, to obfuscate. I began to realize the most important communication the industry could make after the Fukushima accident is just come clean with that fact: Accidents will happen – and when they do, here’s what to expect. I think that kind of transparency would actually help the industry in the long term. They would get out from the blanket of promising perfection. Then when an accident hits, they won’t have to try to justify why they weren’t saying accidents could happen. When you talk privately to industry leaders, they all acknowledge they can’t promise accidents won’t happen. Their words are carefully parsed. The reaction to Chernobyl, though, seems to have been different in Europe, where plants of the same design were forced offline as European political integration happened. Why do you think that is?

Higginbotham: Chernobyl had a much greater immediate impact in Europe than it ever had in the United States. In the weeks after the explosion, the Italian government banned the sale of leafy vegetables and advised nursing mothers and children to stop drinking fresh milk. Pharmacies in Denmark ran out of stable iodine tablets. Farmers in Scotland and Wales were prohibited from selling meat from sheep that had grazed on hills contaminated by radioactive fallout. Children across the continent became afraid to play in sandboxes. There were constant reminders of the effects of the accident for months and years after the explosion, and the green and anti-nuclear movement was, perhaps, already a more effective force in Europe than in the U.S. by that time. Even so, I think the impact of the accident in the U.S. was pretty significant – all plans to build new reactors were suspended after Chernobyl, weren’t they? The last of the plutonium production reactors in Washington State, which operated on the same principles as the ones in Chernobyl, was also closed down in 1987 … although I think the government insisted at the time that the events were not connected. It sounds as if your experience has shown that the technology of nuclear reactors is simply too complex – and too fraught with the possibility of accidents – for us to handle safely. Is that right? Have we actually been lucky there have only been a handful of nuclear disasters since we began building power reactors?