The world's nuclear fate rests in Japan

Sometimes stating the obvious is sensible.There are a score of good reasons why Japan's nuclear disaster should not scare the world away from atomic power and a bad one why it will. But bad reasoning can cast out rationality.

When nuclear plants go bang on live television - however unrepeatable the causes and controllable the consequences - all the industry's promises about safety and economic logic, and all the arguments for the necessity of building plants to mitigate climate change, are blown away in a scary cloud of caesium dust.