There are many disturbingly parallels between the two events. Both involve industries, nuclear power and deepwater oil, that are seen as technological answers to conventional oil depletion. And both involve companies that were giants in their respective energy industries.

But the Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO), like BP, is no angel. Between 1977 and 2002, it was found to have falsified nuclear safety data on at least 200 separate occasions. Public disclosure of the TEPCO’s numerous nuclear indiscretions forced the resignation of the company’s president, Nobuya Minami, and a number of board members in 2005.

Safety concerns were of sufficient magnitude that the Japanese government forced TEPCO to shut down all 17 of the company’s boiling water reactors for inspection after evidence surfaced that Japan’s largest utility and nuclear operator had failed to report numerous incidents at their nuclear plants.

But the firm’s problems didn’t end there. Only two years after TEPCO was allowed to restart its boiling water reactors, an earthquake in 2007 forced the company to admit its reactor in the Niigata Chuetsu-Oki region was not built to withstand such tremors. The plant was immediately shut down and has not been reopened since.

So much for the Japanese nuclear industry’s “world-leading earthquake resistant construction standards”.

Radiation from the Fukushima nuclear power station is now entering the food chain, just as oil from the Deepwater Horizon leak soiled the Gulf of Mexico’s oyster beds and shrimp fishery. Radioactive iodine has already been found in milk 20 kilometers from the crippled power plant and in spinach 100 kilometers away. And trace elements of radioactive iodine are now showing up 220 kilometers in tap water in the Greater Tokyo area, which is home to 35 million residents.

Is the close timing between the Deepwater Horizon and Fukushima disasters just coincidence or is nature trying to tell us something?

Of course, it’s not a message many of us want to hear. The Japanese nuclear power station, like the Deepwater Horizon rig, are both products of our insatiable demand for energy, which compels us to harness ever more costly and problematic sources of energy supply.

As the Japanese assess the growing environmental impact of their nuclear disaster, the country is already making plans to burn more diesel oil, coal and liquid natural gas to make up for the power shortfall. Meanwhile, the Obama administration, feeling the heat from rising gasoline prices and local state pressure, is about to reissue permits for new deep water drilling in the Gulf of Mexico.

The environmental costs seem to be increasing exponentially but our thirst for energy can never seem to be quenched.

Just as many countries were looking for nuclear power to play a growing role in meeting their future energy needs, the world is suddenly looking at the biggest nuclear disaster since Chernobyl.

It’s not a coincidence the countries rely heavily on nuclear power. They are generally the one’s that lack their own hydrocarbon resources, which in the absence of nuclear power, forces strategic dependence on foreign oil gas or coal supplies.

Japan, the world’s third largest oil-consuming economy, fits that bill perfectly. It imports virtually all of the more than four million barrels of oil it consumes every day.

Given its total dependence on imported oil, Japan relies on nuclear for about a third of its power generation with 54 nuclear power generating stations scattered throughout the country.

If the Three Mile Island disaster in 1979 near Harrisburg, Penn. is any guide, the real impact of what’s happening at the Fukushima power plant will be felt for decades. Overnight, the Three Mile Island accident undermined public confidence in the safety of nuclear power. There hasn’t been a new greenfield nuclear power station built in the U.S. for decades. And the nuclear disaster in Japan is now sure to put the kibosh on hopes of any nuclear renaissance in America.

In the U.S.’s case, natural gas and coal has filled the gap for power generation since the Three Mile Island accident. You can bet that U.S. proponents of shale gas will be quick to compare the much-maligned environmental impact of their resource with the environmental impact of a core meltdown at a nuclear power plant.

Japan, however, doesn’t have domestic hydrocarbon resources on hand.  Neither do a lot of other countries.

Nowhere is the fallout from the Fukushima accident going to be bigger than in China and India. China’s latest Five Year Plan calls for a tripling of the country’s 13 currently operating nuclear power plants. At the same time, India has plans to buy 21 nuclear reactors.

Shreyans Kumar Jain, chairman of the state-run monopoly Nuclear Power Corp. of India, already conceded that Japan’s nuclear accident, only a month shy of the 25^th anniversary of the Chernobyl disaster, could put a big damper on his country’s nuclear expansion plans.

And China, like Japan, has been the site of many of the world’s most devastating quakes. A 7.5 magnitude quake in Tangshan killed 250,000 in 1976 and at least 87,000 more perished in a recent quake in Sichuan in 2008.

As Japan’s nuclear disaster starts to rein in other countries’ nuclear power plans, our dependence on hydrocarbons just got that much greater.

The first thing I noticed about smart (i.e. off-peak) prices was how expensive dumb (i.e. peak) prices were. At 9.3 cents per kilowatt hour, power ain’t cheap anymore on the grid Sir Adam Beck built from Niagara Falls.

Sure, if I wanted to do my laundry, run the dishwasher and charge my electric car (if I had one) at night, I could get all the juice I wanted at the very reasonable price of 4.4 cents per kilowatt hour. But I might just want to sleep and leave the laundry and dishes for another day and take the bus to work in the morning.

Toronto Hydro’s new smart-pricing initiative is married to Ontario’s new Green Energy Act, which sanctions increased reliance on renewable energy. After gagging on the cost estimates for a couple more reactors, the province backed away from nuclear. And it’s vowing to close down North America’s single largest source of CO² emissions, the Nanticoke coal plant, within the next four years (mind you, the same Ontario government has promised this before).

Tomorrow’s power will come from renewables via a $7 billion deal with Samsung to install wind turbines in the Great Lakes, and to provide solar energy as well.

Many will applaud the addition of this clean and renewable source of power to the grid. Fewer will applaud the 19-cent-per-kilowatt-hour price tag that’ll come along with it.

As they say in stock brokerage, find a strong enough wind, and even pigs can fly. Pay 19 cents per kilowatt hour for power, and you can let the wind turn on the lights. But at that price, how long will you leave them on?

The larger the contribution wind power makes to tomorrow’s grid, the less power you will be able to afford to draw from it—the same way triple-digit oil prices, which will pull tomorrow’s oil supply out of Alberta’s tar sands, will translate into pump prices that’ll force millions of drivers right off the road.

It’s not how many megawatts of additional power new sources like wind add to the grid that counts. Rather, it’s the amount of power demand that a 19-cent–per- kilowatt-hour price will kill that’ll have a far greater effect.

In the end, Ontario’s implicit strategy of future price rationing may be the best energy policy of them all. If power prices keep rising, demand will peak, and maybe then we won’t need to build any new power plants in the first place.

As for my new smart meter, what bears monitoring is how its benchmarks will change. With wind turbines taking over from coal plants, tomorrow’s smart power prices will soon cost more than today’s dumb ones.