(Made Three Mile Island look like a picnic)

Right after posting my week-long report on Three Mile Island, I was asked by a number of readers to also add Chernobyl (as well as Love Canal and Bhopal) to the mix of historic disasters brought on by human error.

Without a doubt, Chernobyl is one of the worst examples of a wrong switch flipped. With a continuing death toll twenty-three years later and an entire city abandoned, it gives pause to the argument that Nuclear energy is completely safe. It is the consideration that always needs to be brought into the equation, and very often isn't.

This is not to advocate abandoning Nuclear power as an energy source. It is to advocate, as with all new technologies that have capabilities of great good as well as great harm, balance and diligent safeguards and realize things can always go terribly, terribly wrong.

Here is a very interesting photo essay on Chernobyl and the aftermath twenty years after.

Look at the photos and imagine any one of a number of cities you know.