Finally, some voting activists have urged a last-minute push for independent exit polling, parallel to but independent of polling by media groups (whose combined operation suffered a meltdown during the upset Republican electoral triumph in 2002).
David Dybdahl, the consultant they've chosen, previously helped to insure containment operations after the Chernobyl meltdown.
It is impossible, on a brief visit, to grasp the scale and complexity of the post-meltdown operation at the Fukushima Daiichi power plant.
In a vague press statement, Rep. John Mica warned of a "dramatic meltdown of TSA operations" at an unnamed Florida airport.
With a thousand reactors in operation, the N.R.C. standard would permit one meltdown a decade.
East Coast operations, he says now, were in "a total meltdown".
Global co-operation was decisive in arresting last year's financial meltdown.
Nuclear plants, the regulators suggested, will be allowed to operate as long as the odds of a melt down accident are kept within a certain limit: less than one meltdown per 10,000 reactors-years of operation.
But ask President George W. Bush about the effect of having an incompetent Federal Emergency Management Agency during Hurricane Katrina, or lax operations at the Securities and Exchange Commission, which contributed to the economic meltdown.
Fliers could expect a surge in delays as combining operations and computer systems would most likely create service meltdowns.
