There is renewed interest, and actual progress, in building new nuclear power plants in the United States.¹ A news broadcast last nigh covered plans to build a new plant near existing ones on the Chesapeake Bay. The broadcasters provided an opportunity for a spokesman from the Union of Concerned Scientists to opine that such a power plant could produce an incident like Chernobyl. He specifically claimed that a loss of coolant would result in a spread of nuclear material just like Chernobyl. This claim is nonsense.