REUTERS– Anxiety over Japan‘s
quake-crippled nuclear reactors has triggered calls from lawmakers and
activists for review of U.S. energy policy and for brakes on expansion
of domestic nuclear power.
President Barack Obama has
urged expansion of nuclear power to help meet the country’s energy
demands, lower its dependence on imported fossil fuels and reduce its
climate-warming greenhouse gas emissions. But
as engineers in Japan tried on Sunday to avert a meltdown at three
nuclear reactors following Friday’s massive earthquake, some U.S. policy
makers were reevaluating their take on nuclear energy even as the
industry itself offered assurances about the safety of new and existing
plants. “I don’t want to stop the
building of nuclear power plants,” independent Senator Joe Lieberman,
chairman of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs
Committee, said on the CBS television’s “Face the Nation.” “But
I think we’ve got to kind of quietly put, quickly put, the brakes on
until we can absorb what has happened in Japan as a result of the
earthquake and the tsunami and then see what more, if anything, we can
demand of the new power plants that are coming on line,” Lieberman
added. Since the 1979 accident at
the Three Mile Island nuclear plant in Pennsylvania, many Americans have
harbored concerns about nuclear power’s safety. Controversy has also
dogged the nuclear power industry due to its radioactive waste, which is
now stored on site at reactor locations around the country. Read full article about Japan Nuclear Woes Cast Shadow Over US Energy Policy. © Copyright 2011 Thomson Reuters Photo by Bagalute flickr user
