This is my favorite book on the state of atomic energy: http://www.amazon.com/Atomic-Accidents-Meltdowns-Disasters-M.... The book looks at the history of atomic accidents from an engineering perspective right up to Fukushima. The author is a nuclear engineer and understands the systems he talks about.

Interestingly I came away from a book about atomic disasters being pretty pro nuclear, at least more so than I was before reading the book. Here are my main take aways:

- The US needs to start back up the waste reprocessing program. Jimmy Carter banned this in the hopes of setting a good example for other countries (one of the byproducts being plutonium). But everyone else continues to process nuclear waste except for the US and it just makes the waste storage problem that much harder. 95% of the fuel that comes out of a rector is harmless U-238. We should only be burying a tiny fraction of what we currently bury.

- We need to start innovating beyond PWR and BWR reactors. Things like liquid metal fuel reactors have the nice property of not having to worry about them melting down because they are already melted.

Sort of related to this post; I recently read Atomic Accidents: A History of Nuclear Meltdowns and Disasters: From the Ozark Mountains to Fukushima [0]. I was not expecting much from the book, but it turned out to be FANTASTIC, would highly recommend if you have any interest in nuclear accidents or nuclear energy in general; I learned a lot from reading it.

[0] http://www.amazon.com/dp/1605986801/

edit: formatting

Atomic Accidents - A History of Nuclear Meltdowns and Disasters, by James Mahaffey. http://www.amazon.com/Atomic-Accidents-Meltdowns-Disasters-M...