The three-eyed fish of the Simpsons don’t seem as funny as they once did.

The nuclear reactor catastrophe that is adding to all the other terrible tragedies in the wake of Japan’s quake and tsunami this week serves to highlight a question that hasn’t been asked much for a while: does nuclear power make sense at all? If you want a quick refresher on the topic, this Discovery “10 Pros and Cons” list seems even-handed and apolitical in its assessment. While some of the virtues of nuclear power are remarkable – i.e., the low cost and clean process during actual energy production – I’ve personally never thought they outweighed the impact of mining the necessary materials, the short term risk, or the necessity to store thousands of tons of radioactive waste annually for literally tens of thousands of years. The process only has a low environmental impact while producing the energy, and really only in comparison to the horrific waste and destruction wrought by fossil fuels. Although legislation has put on hold the use of the Yucca Mountains as America’s dumping grounds for radioactive waste, there has been no commitment to stop creating the stuff, so I don’t know what we call that. Progress? Poor planning? In any case the event in Japan will of course politicize the topic again; Joe Lieberman, for instance, didn’t miss a beat to do some bandstanding on Face The Nation, and I have to admit I experienced a little queasiness when today’s headlines commonly said things like Japan radiation unlikely to reach US , and pointed out that the only fallout here in the states would be legislative. The irony of a US-made reactor failing in Japan of all places is of course both a sad and painful irony. For insight into what actually is happening in the Japanese reactors, see this Scientific American piece. If there has been any positive news, it is that the reactor problems in Japan so far are not full meltdowns, and even if they were, the results would be nothing like the Chernobyl disaster in the eighties. By the way, if you’ve never seen the Kid of Speed website created by Elena Filatova back in 2004, you should. It captures the weird vibe of an area hundreds of miles wide that humans won’t occupy safely for decades, thanks to a single nuclear accident. And although a tremendous increase in the wildlife population around Chernobyl has occurred, mutations are in fact common. Maybe the three-eyed fish of the Simpsons cartoons aren’t so funny after all.