"Most people today," writes political
philosopher John Gray, "think they belong to a species that can be
master of its destiny. This is faith, not science."
The
unfolding disaster at Japan's Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station
sorely strains that faith, as did the 1979 crisis at Pennsylvania's
Three Mile Island nuclear plant and the 1986 catastrophe at Chernobyl in
the Ukraine.