Nuclear Power. Safer Than Sex!

That was the message on the front of a T-shirt that my friend Jay Halpern gave to me when I was 13 years old. His dad was some kind of nuclear architect who brought home these kind of workplace trinkets the way my dad, an orthodontist, filled our medicine cabinets with promotional toothbrushes. The shirt, white with red piping and featuring an oversize atom, moved immediately into heavy rotation of my junior high school wardrobe, not to advocate for any specific energy policy but because I was quietly thrilled just to have the word “sex” on my chest and happy to have girls my age associate me with it. And until the events of the past week demanded otherwise, that is about the last time I recall thinking critically about the topic of nuclear power… read more >