From a windswept corner of Hokkaido, Japan's northernmost island, Japan Steel Works Ltd. controls the fate of the global nuclear-energy renaissance.

There stands the only plant in the world, a survivor of Allied bombing in World War II, capable of producing the central part of a nuclear reactor's containment vessel in a single piece, reducing the risk of a radiation leak.

Utilities that won't need the equipment for years are making $100 million down payments now on components Japan Steel makes from 600-ton ingots. Each year the Tokyo-based company can turn out just four of the steel forgings that contain the radioactivity in a nuclear reactor. Even after it doubles capacity in the next two years, there won't be enough production to meet building plans.

China and South Korea could indeed build more forges and ramp up the supply chain within five years. Then we'd be back to the original  blindness that the answer is staring us in the face, but we refuse to see it.

A healthy civilization would want its energy directly from the sun, distributed throughout society, period. Not with 400 million years of poison added on, not with ersatz suns created by a military-technical elite, not with the danger of a "whoops" hanging around for a few thousand years.

But what do eye know?

"Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one's courage." - Anaïs Nin