In the late 1970s and early 1980s, a whole lot of people were more or less resigned to the eventual inevitable newscast alerting citizens to an irreversible catastrophe involving a nuclear power plant. The Three Mile Island accident happened in central Pennsylvania in 1979, the same year that The China Syndrome hit #1 at the U.S. box office for four weeks in a row. The word of the moment was “meltdown,” which has since morphed into a signifier for an emotional breakdown—it’s interesting to ponder the scary origins of that term. The disaster did end up happening, but nobody suspected that the location might instead be a place like Chernobyl, a town in northern Ukraine, then a part of the USSR. I grew up a few miles from the Indian Point power plant in Westchester County, NY. I vividly remember the helpful and entirely futile document distributed to local residents as to what to do in the event of an emergency. A glance at a map is sufficient to drive home the idea that if something catastrophic were to happen to Indian Point, there wasn’t going to be any realistic way to deal with the roughly 25 million...