Richard Lester writes in today’s WSJ:

Today’s most advanced designs move toward the goal of ‘walk-away safety’—reactors that shut down and cool themselves without electricity or any human intervention.
The accident at Japan’s Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power station is still far from resolved. A major public health disaster seems to have been avoided, and the long-term impact on health and safety will be dwarfed by the devastating loss of life caused directly by the huge Tohoku earthquake and tsunami. But the nuclear crisis has badly scared people around the world
Predictably, longtime antinuclear activists are calling for an end to any further nuclear development. Equally predictably, spokesmen for the industry say the Japanese earthquake was a once-in-a-millennium event and point to the greater safety of newer reactors.
In the U.S., the most urgent need in the wake of the accident is to assess the safety of existing nuclear power plants. Plans to extend the operating life of some 40-year-old reactors for another two decades should be reviewed, and costly upgrades may be required. We must also revisit the longstanding issue of how and where to store spent nuclear fuel. The sensible solution would be to store it in dry concrete casks at one or two central locations. Instead, decades of political dithering have produced only gridlock, so spent fuel remains in ­increasingly densely-packed storage pools at dozens of sites around the country.
Still, the overall impact of the accident will be fairly small here. The so-called nuclear renaissance wasn’t really going anywhere in the U.S. even before the Japanese earthquake. For most utilities, new nuclear plants are simply too big and expensive to contemplate. Only a few such plants would have been built over the next decade. Now some of those may be scrapped.
But that’s hardly the end of the story. This year is the 100th anniversary of the discovery of the atomic nucleus, and a little over 70 years since nuclear fission was first demonstrated. In historical terms, that puts the field of nuclear engineering today roughly where electrical engineering was in 1900. Consider what followed: the creation of the electric power grid, television and telecommunications, the revolutions in microelectronics and computation, and much more. None of it was anticipated by the electrical engineers of 1900.

The rest here.