Midnight in Chernobyl: The Untold Story of the World's Greatest Nuclear Disaster

by Adam Higginbotham

Sweeping away the convenient fallacy that what had happened in Chernobyl had been a once-in-a-million-years fluke, the Fukushima accident stifled the nuclear renaissance in the cradle: the Japanese government immediately took all of its remaining forty-eight nuclear reactors off-line, and Germany shut down eight of its seventeen reactors, with the announced intention of closing the rest by 2022 as part of a move to renewable energy. Existing plans for all new reactors in the United States were suspended or canceled. Yet nuclear power endured. More than seven years after the Japanese disaster, the United States still had a hundred licensed and operational power reactors—including one at Three Mile Island. France continued to generate 75 percent of its electricity from nuclear plants, and China had recently embarked on a reactor building spree, with twenty new units under construction and thirty-nine already in operation.