After spent nuclear fuel rods have been sitting in pools of water for several years, they can be taken out and stored in large concrete casks. With no permanent nuclear waste solution in sight in this country, that's where a lot of our old rods now sit. If we're not mistaken, all of the Trojan plant's waste is now stored that way, above ground, next to the mighty Columbia River in scenic Rainier, Oregon. The rods will remain hella deadly for thousands of years, but as long as they're in these casks, and the casks stay intact, everything's fine.

The casks won't last forever, though, and the rods will probably have to be taken out of old casks and put into new ones every few hundred years. My heaven, it's so absurd even to be writing about that.

Anyway, the latest news from Virginia is a little unsettling. About two dozen vertical casks at the North Anna nuclear power plant, about seven miles from the epicenter of the August 23 earthquake, apparently shifted about 4½ inches on their pads during all the shaking. If those babies start falling or crumbling, the surrounding area could find itself in some deep kim chee.

It also turns out that the nuclear plant itself may have been shaken beyond its design limits, which means that the neighbors are dang lucky there wasn't a serious breach in some crucial system or other. Oh, that safe, clean, cheap nuclear power.