We are way, way behind when it comes to the hard work of preventing accidents and responding to these catastrophes when they happen. With the deep-water oil drilling, we allowed the technological advances to drive the process at a rate that was unsafe, and we got really badly burned. The potential of a nuclear catastrophe is a major disaster in waiting.

Dr. Irwin Redlener, the director of the National Center for Disaster Preparedness at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health