Seems sort of revisionist to say "of course Mark I BWR's aren't safe". You know what nuclear experts were saying 3 weeks ago? They were talking about all the safety features, and the multiple levels of basically impervious containment, and how radioactive material would never get out into the environment. And here we are with a pretty serious radioactive mess to clean up (and from the looks of it it's probably going to get worse before it gets better)

If you're making the argument that we more closely scrutinize 40 year old designs, you'll find no resistance here.

But the problem is that using Fukushima as an argument against nuclear, is like using a car crash as an argument against transportation.

My point is they were either wrong or lying. Both possibilities are pretty worrying.

They were wrong because they didn't take into account the possibility that backup power would be unavailable for so long. The backup generators and their switchgear were sited very poorly--behind a seawall that was overcome by the tsunami.

Please note that I'm not saying the reactor designs themselves weren't old and out of date. They were. But that wasn't the root cause of the problems. The stresses that these reactors have withstood due to the lack of backup power are far beyond any safety specification they were built to.

The problem is that people also compare this with outdated designs for coal plants.

There are much cleaner modern coal plants with filters. Still coal is dirty and dangerous.

In the nuclear industry you have new designs. But this does not solve the basic problems:

* mining of Uranium is dirty

* you need to transport dangerous material

* nuclear weapons can be produced

* reprocessing is extremely dirty

* storage is unsolved

* it promotes large corporations with all problems (corruption, ...)

* a society needs to be sufficiently advanced to handle the risk (i.e. better than Japan, the Soviet Union, or the US)

* the capital costs are large, needs to financed by the government

Plus with the new reactors you get interesting new dangers. Ever heard of 'stuxnet'? There are now viruses and attacks against nuclear facilities based on computer viruses.

Look a bit more into the different alternative nuclear designs. We have enough stored 'waste' to use it as fuel for a long time, not requiring much if any mining. Nuclear weapons can not be produced from these reactors. They use the material so storage is not an issue. They can use passive cooling which does not depend on computers that could be infected.

How long does the passive cooling work?

The problem with Chernobyl was that it was an outdated design that should have been decommissioned. The problem with Fukushima was that it was an outdated design that should have been decommissioned. Does Mr Brown want to wait another 5 years to use the same excuse for Washington's Columbia Generating Station?