Radiation Levels Outside the Plant: Twice the Legal Limit As part of the cooling efforts, "plant operators had to release radioactive vapor into the atmosphere," The New York Times reports.

To avoid dangerous climate change we will have to limit the total amount of carbon we inject into the atmosphere, not just the emission rate in any given year.

But the biggest change in Earth's energy budget by far over the past hundred years is due to the accumulation in our atmosphere of greenhouse gases, which limit the exit of heat into space.