Over the decades, I have tried very hard to be open-minded about nuclear power. I have met with nuclear scientists who work for the nuclear industry, held editorial board meetings with them, read their literature and several books that made arguments in favour of building more nuclear power plants.

This picture taken on March 11, 2011 by Sadatsugu Tomizawa and released via Jiji Press on March 21, 2011 shows tsunami waves hitting the coast of Minamisoma in Fukushima prefecture. The total radiation that will result from the damage to the nuclear power reactors in Fukushima, Japan will likely surpass Chernobyl 'by orders of magnitude,' by the end of April, says Dr. Helen Caldicott. (Photograph by: SADATSUGU TOMIZAWA, AFP/Getty Images)

It was hard work for me. As a teenager, I could often be found protesting against anything nuclear. My angst-ridden teenage poetry had little to do with puppy love; rather, it often focused on the potential of nuclear Armageddon. Dr. Helen Caldicott was one of my heroes, and I attended and watched more special screenings of her Academy Award-winning film, If You Love the Planet, than my friends watched the hunky Harrison Ford in Raiders of the Lost Ark and all subsequent Indiana Jones movies combined.

The 32nd anniversary of the partial core meltdown at the Three Mile Island nuclear plant in Pennsylvania is coming up on March 28. Just 12 days before that accident, the 1979 movie, The China Syndrome, starring Jane Fonda, Jack Lemmon and Michael Douglas, opened to critical acclaim but scientific derision from nuclear experts at the time saying such an accident was highly unlikely to ever occur. Less than two weeks later, they were eating their words, but still pointing out how exceedingly rare a core meltdown would be.

Then, in 1986, while my then-fiance and current husband and I were travelling around Europe, the Chernobyl nuclear power plant melted down and exploded. Forget about enjoying a nice latte in Piazza San Marco in Venice. No milk available. It was too radioactive. No lettuce, no tomatoes -virtually no fresh produce was available, as Europe was coated with the radioactive dust from the fire caused by accident that has claimed thousands of lives and rendered a chunk of Ukraine uninhabitable for about 25,000 years.

The Soviet totalitarian Communist government at the time lied constantly to the world and their own people about the gravity of the risks. Indeed, many of those who died from thyroid cancer after the explosion likely would have lived much longer had the communists simply banned milk sales.

And now we have Fukushima in Japan. Apparently, the reactors held up relatively well after the 9.0 magnitude earthquake on March 11. The subsequent, predictable tsunami is causing the nuclear calamity. Some experts now say that had the backup generators to the six nuclear reactors simply been raised several storeys out of the basement, none of this would have happened. That nuclear power plants were allowed to be built in such a volatile earthquake zone is astonishing. But to then not raise the reactors out of harm's way of a tsunami is, frankly, criminal.

Reached at a hotel in Montreal Thursday night, Caldicott, my old hero, takes no pleasure in being able to say "I told you so" about her prediction on page 87 of her 2006 book, Nuclear Power is Not the Answer.

"If you build nuclear reactors on an earthquake fault next to the sea, this is inevitable and I kept saying it over and over for 35 years. It is also going to happen in the U.S. sooner rather than later," she said, referring to Diablo Canyon and San Onofre, two nuclear power plants in California located on earthquake faults, and susceptible to tsunamis.

Richard Meserve, a former Nuclear Regulatory Commission chairman, told the Wall Street Journal earlier this week that the Japanese reactors experienced a "one-two punch of events beyond what anyone could expect or what was conceived."

Utter nonsense, says Caldicott. "It was inevitable and totally predictable."

Indeed, events like the one at Fukushima had been foretold in a 1990 report by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission in the U.S. stating that power outages to the backup diesel generators at nuclear plants in earthquake zones leading to the failure of the cooling systems would be the "most likely causes" for a nuclear accident by external events.

"Nuclear reactors are the most dangerous machines mankind has ever built," Caldicott said. Indeed, Albert Einstein -the man who first split the atom -said "nuclear power is a hell of a way to boil water."

Well, the people of Japan know better than most that nuclear bombs are hell, and now are learning that so is nuclear energy.

Iouli Andreev, a Russian nuclear accident specialist who was brought in to help make Chernobyl safer, is slamming the United Nations' International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and nuclear corporations for dismissing lessons from Chernobyl to ensure that expansion of the industry continued.

Andreev told Reuters news agency that a fire that released radiation last Tuesday involved spent fuel rods stored close to the reactors at Fukushima, a clear example of putting profits before safety.

"The Japanese were very greedy and they used every square inch of the space. But when you have a dense placing of spent fuel in the basin you have a high possibility of fire if the water is removed from the basin," Andreev said.

That is exactly what has happened in Japan.

The 25th anniversary of Chernobyl -ranked a level-7 nuclear accident -is coming up on April 26. Caldicott predicts that Fukushima, ranked a six on the scale of severity, will surpass Chernobyl "by orders of magnitude," by then.

Chernobyl had only been operating for three months. Fukushima has reactors that are about 40 years old. "There's a hell of a lot more radiation there than at Chernobyl," it's leaking and those brave workers who are sacrificing themselves to prevent a full meltdown are improvising, said Caldicott. Humans are fallible and nuclear power cannot be. Ultimately, that's what renders it absurd.

It's past time to close the door and our minds to nuclear power.