Cutting Edge: Safe? The answer's blowing in wind

Fallout ... that was one big reason why some people have always opposed nuclear power.
What once seemed to me to be cool, hip rebellion - like listening to Bob Dylan records in the dark and painting my fingernails white - now seems so tame.
The world has moved on fast; I'd now need a dozen facial piercings, a dragon tattooed on my buttocks, and slabs of steel through both ears to get the same traction.
At school there was then a paramilitary attitude towards wearing uniforms, which gave huge scope for tame rebellions that wouldn't even be noticed today.
I saw uniforms as a franking machine that marked you as you passed through the system, turning you into suitable fodder for possibly sorting out filing cabinets in some meaningless machine of a clerical system, and I'd be having none of that.
I'd be marrying John Lennon.
Feeble as those battles were, in hindsight, and pathetic as the victories might be, they gave pleasure that almost eclipsed the point of schooling itself, especially with badges.
We who would never be those storm troopers of The Man, prefects, had the most fun with badges that were inherently worthy - religious fundraising badges, saving of endangered creatures badges, anything with a literary angle, but best of all the ban-the-bomb badge. I kept mine for years, until my own kids found it, thought it was funny, and lost it.
Who could honestly argue against banning the bomb?
What possible moral high ground could they stand on while they did it?
The first few decades after the last war, when atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, were lived in the shadow of the nuclear threat.
You were either paranoid - my position - or left to insist that the bomb was dropped in a good cause and we should be glad it happened.
That was not an altogether popular position, but plenty of people clung to it.
People really did build private fallout shelters, where they were going to survive for thousands of years until the bad atomic-bomb chemicals had worn themselves out. They genuinely feared there'd be a nuclear war any day, as survivalists everywhere still do.
Meanwhile, some of us schoolkids wore our little peace badges self-righteously, because we were the perfect age for self-righteousness. If you don't know everything when you're 15, there's something wrong with you. It takes a few decades, and a few kids of your own, to discover that you know nothing, and never knew anything at all - which is why it comes as a surprise to me to think now that I was probably right.
I was in Europe not long after the disaster at the Chernobyl reactor in Russia. All the old paranoia came back to me then, remembering the boring leftie publications I'd once read, or tried to read and fallen asleep over, about what happens when an atomic bomb goes off, and especially about fallout.
Fallout was the big thing you had to watch out for if some fool dropped an atomic bomb, that much I understood, because it would linger for trillions of years, invisibly poisoning the world.
That was one big reason why some people have always opposed nuclear power: who could honestly say it could be made 100 per cent safe to use, and nothing could go wrong?
It was an argument the antis lost - until now. We're now talking about fallout, just as people did in the past, when the British and the French carried out nuclear "tests" in the Pacific.
I'm in awe of the Japanese workers trying to avert, or at least minimise, threatened disaster at the Fukushima Dai-Ichi nuclear complex. They are heroic, as the selfless workers at Chernobyl were before them. And I find I'm again asking questions that I asked as a rebellious kid with a protest badge on her blazer: Can this kind of energy ever be truly safe? Could any amount of risk be worth it?
It's true that the combination of a tidal wave and earthquake of such magnitude was a worst-possible-case scenario, but such scenarios - and worse - have a habit of happening.
Praise nuclear power all you like, but I remember Bob Dylan's dirges about fiddling about with atoms, and not one of them had a happy ending.