The events unfolding in Japan are a wake-up call for Americans about the dangers of nuclear power. Our current use of nuclear power is gambling with the environment and our families’ health. Unfortunately, in Japan Mother Nature has yet again proven stronger than anything we can design.

The consequences of losing this bet are enormous. The news is getting worse and our attempts to cool the most critical nuclear reactors are proving ineffective. There have already been and will be more long-term effects of this disaster in Japan. Crops and swaths of land around the reactor have already been contaminated. Now, the drinking water for tens of millions of people is tainted and already too dangerous for infants. The radiation from all these sources will lead to the increased likelihood of cancer in people exposed.

Japan is a long ways away from us, but Calvert Cliffs Nuclear Power Plant is not. Calvert Cliffs is just 47 miles from my home in Washington, and if the worst were to happen here it would be my family the Nuclear Regulatory Commission would be telling to evacuate and leave our home behind. The pictures would be of my daughter getting scanned for radiation. I cannot believe there is any gain that is worth the risk.

We must act now to ensure the relative safety of existing plants, put a moratorium on any new plants, and begin to phase out our use nuclear power. In all cases the process should start, but not end, with plants on fault lines, near coasts or large bodies of water, in the hurricane zone or of the same design as the reactors in Japan. We can and must move away from energy technologies that put our environment and families’ health at massive risk and repower our country with clean, renewable energy, like wind and solar power.

Japan's nuclear crisis is still an unfolding story as we continue to learn of more details about the Fukushima Daiichi power facility, including insufficient safety testing and regulators ignoring vulnerabilities, choosing to fix the issue on new plants rather than retrofit old ones.

Nevertheless, safety measures should be reviewed and enhanced where necessary to avoid another such catastrophe. We should not stall the development of nuclear energy with a moratorium but we should carefully consider where to place them, particularly proximity to fault lines. China in particular should give careful review to its rapid nuclear development given its high density population and high incidence of earthquakes. Most of the newer nuclear reactors around the world have greater safety measures than the older models. Nuclear remains a very viable energy source that should continue to be pursued, particularly diminutive reactors that are slimmed-down and are expected to be considerably safer. Our energy demands are increasing rapidly and nuclear power remains an important part of our energy future.

Reading these posts about the tragedy in Japan reminds me a little of Kurosawa’s famous epic, Rashomon, about how an event can look very different to different onlookers.

The Nuclear Energy Institute assures us that US energy operators are “Now” taking safety precautions “Now!” Hmm – what were they doing yesterday?

Indeed, Marvin Fertel claims that US reactors will be upgraded so that the industry can “verify” that their back-up systems can “withstand a total loss of electric power to a nuclear power plant” and still “maintain safety at the facility .” The idea that a pressurized or boiling water reactor deprived of all electric power can maintain safety is, bluntly, a joke – what the plant operators are undoubtedly looking at is whether they can maintain back-up power regardless of the calamity they experience. As well they should.

But why didn’t they before?

Bill O’Keefe sees this incident, atypically, much the same way I do. It’s yet another black swan from the bevy that have plagued the nuclear industry from its birth. Fukushima had different causes and a different pathway than Chernobyl, and Chernobyl was very different than Three Mile Island. The problem with nuclear is not that it fails so often, but that failure is, uniquely, unacceptable, so I think O’Keefe is right to say that the nuclear renaissance is now “out of sight” and to comment that “How a company could build a reactor to withstand a 9.0 earthquake and ignore the tsunami risk is beyond comprehension.” Well, its beyond comprehension unless you have followed the nuclear industry closely – in that circle this kind of recklessness is pretty much par for the course.

Christine Parthemore suggests that the emphasis may shift to Generation III or IV nuclear designs – that seems sensible. We know that the current designs are plagued with safety problems and proliferation risks – why are we building more of them?

Bernard Weinstein joins the select circle of observors who think that Fukushima is evidence of the safety of nuclear power, because the reactor itself appears to have survived a very severe earthquake intact. Of course, it then proceeded to destroy itself once deprives of battery power – once again demonstrating that the problem with nuclear isn’t always the reactors – it’s the whole system and its reliance on unachievable levels of human perfection.

So here are three lessons I think we can learn from this disaster. I doubt the nuclear industry will absorb these on its own – so the rest of us should act in self defense.

First, the nuclear industry and its associated government regulators, in both Japan and the U.S., have not learned to tell the truth. Communications are opaque, intended to soothe not inform, to conceal, not reveal. What Admiral Hyman Rickover once called "the nuclear priesthood" is still celebrating its rituals in a language that the rest of us are not intended to understand.

Early last Sunday morning, a colleague who had previously managed TVA's Browns Ferry nuclear power plant, the twin to the Japanese reactors, emailed me a detailed description of what had actually happened at Fukushima Daiichi. His email predicted precisely the events that were confirmed two days later by the Japanese authorities as having happened -- so they obviously knew the truth on Sunday. But what did they say? As late as Monday, Chief Cabinet Secretary Yuko Edano said, "I have received reports that the containment vessel is sound. I understand that there is little possibility that radioactive materials are being released in large amounts."

The media have reported that all over Japan the public is enraged at their inability to get straightforward information from their own government and from Tokyo Electric. The International Atomic Energy Commission is still, today, asking the Japanese government to provide more information.

While the NRC's Jaczko on Tuesday was willing to describe far more of what was happening in Japan than the Japanese themselves, U.S. nuclear authorities are clearly unable or unwilling to tell us the truth about our own risks. On March 13 -- when the magnitude of the radiation releases to come was obviously a complete mystery -- the NRC pledged that "Hawaii, Alaska, the U.S. Territories and the U.S. West Coast are not expected to experience any harmful levels of radiation." When the first bits of radiation arrived in the U.S. today, health officials in Los Angeles said "Our position has not changed: We still do not expect to see an increase in harmful levels of radiation in California."

What is lacking are any simple explanation of what the authorities are defining as "harmful," what the possible range of exposures are, and what potential level of releases from Fukushima Daiichi are being taken into account. How bad a scenario are they considering? The information that is being released is unhelpful and won't enable anyone to judge their actual risk. One expert said, intending to be reassuring, that the level being experienced in California was only "one microsievert", about 1/100th of the exposure from a chest X-ray. But one microsievert over what period of time? A week? A day? An hour? A minute? A microsievert a minute is equivalent to a chest X-Ray every two hours -- a very big deal indeed.

The second thing that the crisis reveals is that the nuclear energy endeavor is chock full of what Nassim Nicholas Taleb calls "Black Swans": high-impact, hard to predict, and rare events that are beyond the realm of normal expectations. Taleb argues that history is much more dominated than we understand by such Black Swans, things that we have a hard time imagining could happen (just as we expect a swan to be white) until we encounter them, after which we explain them as "just too improbable to have been predicted." Chernobyl and Three Mile Island were fundamentally different than Fukushima Daiichi. In both the Ukraine and Pennsylvania, a single reactor encountered serious operational problems on its own, and plant operators reacted improperly to control them. The reactors and their operators failed to behave as expected.

Here there is no evidence whatsoever of any internal or operator failure in the reactors -- yet we have six nuclear reactors in a state of partial meltdown. What happened was an unanticipated system failure -- the tsunami took out the back-up power system, after the earthquake had triggered the automatic shut-down of the reactor itself. The reactor shut-down system performed perfectly -- if there had been earthquake damage the reactor would have been stopped. What the designers failed to take into account, however, was that a nuclear power plant deprived of both its own primary power and its back-up power burns itself up -- automatically -- because none of its cooling systems can operate without power. Now this is a design problem that can be remedied. But that doesn't mean that there are not other -- perhaps many other -- Black Swans waiting to provide ugly surprises for the nuclear energy industry.

The third staggering lesson is that those who are dedicated to a nuclear future are much less dedicated to making that future safe, even when they know about a problem. You could say that the nuclear industry, nuclear regulators and nuclear advocates can't even handle ordinary white swans. In the United States, on March 15 a federal court turned down an appeal by environmentalists that the Nuclear Regulatory Commission should require the Indian Point Nuclear Power plant to meet the Commission's own standards for the ability of control cables in a plant to withstand a fire. Indian Point's cables will withstand only half the fire they are supposed to, somethign the Commission has known about for six years. But instead of asking Entergy Corporation, which operates the plant, to upgrade its wiring, the Commission simply gave it a waiver -- and the Court upheld this decision!

The same day, a coalition of state Attorneys General was forced to sue the NRC, because it is now proposing to allow nuclear power plants to store their high-level spent fuel rods -- the same rods that caused the majority of the problem at one of the Japanese reactors -- on site, for 60 years after the reactor itself is shut down -- without any environmental review! In issuing the policy, the NRC stunningly found that storing this waste for 60 years at more than 100 plants raised no significant safety or environmental issues.

But in this post I'll leave the last word to Rush Limbaugh, who actually thinks it is funny that the tsunami and nuclear crisis hit Japan -- it's payback for the Prius:
"The Japanese have done so much to save the planet.... They've given us the Prius. Even now, refugees are still recycling their garbage, and yet Gaia levels them [laughs], just wipes them out. Wipes out their nuclear plants, all kinds of radiation. What kind of payback is this?"

Not even Kurosawa put a perspective like that into Rashomon!

The nuclear “renaissance” for the last two decades has been like the horizon, it recedes as we approach it. Now, it is out of sight. The main reasons have been the residual fear from Three Mile Island, partisan politics, waste disposal, and cost. Of those, cost has been a major barrier with nuclear power being about 30% higher than conventional power.

The effect of the Japanese disaster will set back nuclear power probably for a decade or more even though mismanagement by Tokyo Electric(TECO) may be worse than anything likely to occur here. How a company could build a reactor to withstand a 9.0 earthquake and ignore the tsunami risk is beyond comprehension. When all of the facts are in, it will probably be the case of both TECO mismanagement and government failure to enforce.

There is growing evidence that the Fukushima plant was troubled and TECO ignored safety warnings. Comments by the IEA have been damning. In spite of its known problems the facility appears to have withstood both the earthquake and tsunami. The achilles heal was the loss of power to maintain cooling.

None the less, the threat of a “Black Swan” will be a major set back to nuclear power here. If for no other reason, additional safety requirements will make it even more costly than it is today. Utilities will simply not be able to raise the needed capital for a $7-$10+ billion investment and lenders will impose high borrowing costs, if there is a willingness to make a loan. The only alternative would be government loan guarantees which made little sense before our debt crisis and make no sense now.

Unlike Japan, we do have a safer and clean alternative--natural gas. As utilities begin adding new capacity and replacing existing capacity, the abundance and affordability of natural gas will make it the fuel of choice.

Even though nuclear should remain a power generating option, it is now a political non-starter. In a world where political over-reaction and rhetoric did not overwhelm reason, this tragedy would be the foundation for “lessons learned” and corrective actions, as appropriate, to our nuclear facilities. But, as the late historian Daniel Boorstin observed, we live in a world where reality is judged by the image; not where the image is judged by reality. The reality is that as humans who err, we can reduce risks but we cannot eliminate them.

The government doesn’t need to impose a moratorium, the market and politics will do without any help from the government. The NRC should focus on evaluating the safety of existing plants and their contingency plans based on the Fukushima disaster. Where plants are close to major population centers, such as the one near New York City, additional redundancy and contingency planning may be called for. Corrective actions should be based on objective risk assessment and not emotional over-reaction. Clearly, one action that should be taken without delay is moving on site stored waste to Yucca Mountain. The current storage policy, if you can call it that is a risk not worth taking.

In addition to influencing how the American public prefers to halt or proceed with nuclear power at home, another way the multifaceted disaster in Japan will affect the U.S. nuclear industry is by reshaping the global export market. Foreign governments and publics will recalculate their investments in nuclear energy, and as they do so in the coming weeks, it will reshape the world's nuclear technology path, and likewise the world's security and proliferation concerns.

While China and Germany have dramatically slowed their nuclear energy plans as the Japan crisis continues to unfold, it is notable that most countries planning to newly enter the nuclear energy market appear hesitant to alter their plans. Given their climbing energy demand, countries recently embracing ambitious nuclear power programs such as Vietnam, Thailand and Indonesia have declared that they will take time to review safety standards or are moving forward as planned despite the concerns raised from the Japan crisis.

One major trend to watch is whether these countries emerging in the nuclear energy space will slow or forego purchase of older reactor designs with a preference for next-generation reactors or designs such as small modular or traveling wave reactors that are being cast as safer and more proliferation-proof. The head of Vietnam's nuclear agency has in fact already declared a preference for generation III or newer reactors. Countries slowing their purchasing plans and demanding reactor designs with higher safety and non-proliferation standards would likely improve regional and global security as compared to the plans of some 45 countries to invest in less cutting-edge reactors. Our securiy concerns will be altered most starkly if the crisis in Japan reorients nuclear energy goals around the Middle East, where nuclear energy plans by every country other than Iraq may couple with the changing political environment in unpredictable ways.

Against this evolving security backdrop and the coming changes to the nuclear energy export market, the American nuclear industry will witness dramatic changes in the coming months. Let's hope that energy policy here in Washington can quickly adapt to this changing environment as well.

The nuclear energy industry’s top priority remains providing Japan with the support necessary to maintain safety at the Fukushima reactors. We send our sympathy and support to the Japanese people in the wake of the earthquake and tsunami. The industry is providing support, resources and expertise from the industry, both technical support and humanitarian support.

All U.S. electric companies that operate nuclear power plants are taking action now to verify their capability to maintain safety even in the face of severe adverse events. The industry is verifying that the emergency response capability to withstand a total loss of electric power to a nuclear power plant will maintain safety at the facility even after extreme events. We also will verify our capability to withstand natural disasters such as earthquakes and flooding, as well as the impact of floods on systems inside and outside the plant.

It is premature to reach conclusions on the long term implications of the Fukushima Daiichi accident, but I believe that expansion of the nuclear energy sector will proceed. Nuclear energy produces electricity for one of every five U.S. homes and businesses and is a vital element of a carbon mitigation strategy. Maintaining U.S. leadership in this global enterprise is essential.

NEI has been forecasting the development of four to eight new reactors between 2016 and 2020; four are under development. The forecast beyond 2020 is unclear simply because so much depends on market conditions.

The Fukushima accident certainly will prompt a review of nuclear energy facility capabilities in America and we support that reassessment. However, we recognize that America’s reactors – which are inspected daily by federal regulators – continue to exceed the Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s (NRC) safety standards.

The U.S. nuclear industry sets the highest standards for safety. America’s 104 nuclear power plants are safe and meet all requirements to protect public health and safety. An important aspect of this commitment is transparency in operation of our plants and inspections of our facilities by the NRC. As President Obama, members of Congress and governors have said repeatedly, these plants will continue to be a key element in meeting America’s energy needs.

With that said, over the past week, industry leaders have reached out to their customers and met with members of Congress and other policymakers to ensure that they understand the facts in Japan. Broadly speaking, these meetings show that support for nuclear energy remains strong. As national leaders seek to enhance our energy security with an expanded domestic portfolio, they are doing so based on the full knowledge of nuclear plant capabilities and our steadfast commitment to safety.

The president and congressional leaders have had a measured response to the Fukushima accident based on their understanding of the U.S. nuclear energy safety record and the unique attributes that it provides to the nation’s electricity portfolio: power plants that generate low-carbon electricity virtually around the clock, with an industry-average capacity factor of 90 percent; and a key component of a diversified energy mix that enhances national security.

America's nuclear industry should always be vigilant, and if there are lessons to be learned from the Fukushima incidents that are relevant to the U.S. nuclear fleet, they should surely be implemented. But we should also keep in mind that the reactors themselves -- some more than 40 years old -- did not suffer structural damage from the 9.0 earthquake. An earthquake of that magnitude, followed by a tsunami, could only occur on America's west coast. Only four of the nation's 104 reactors are located on the west coast, all in California. Still, we should ensure that all currently operating and future nuclear power plants regardless of their geographic location have redundant cooling and electric systems to cope with a "worst case" scenario such as the one that has played out in Japan.

It now appears that most of the radiation at Fukushima is emanating from the spent fuel ponds and not the reactors themselves. That should drive home the imperative of keeping Yucca Mountain open. On site storage is not a substitute for a permanent repository, and absent the assurance that Yucca Mountain will be able to accept spent fuel no utility company is going to invest in a new nuclear plant.

Another lesson to draw from the events in Japan is the ongoing need to develop all of our domestic energy resources. Thanks to horizontal drilling, hydraulic fracturing, and other technological innovations, domestic oil production actually increased last year for the first time in decades -- despite the Gulf of Mexico drilling moratorium -- while non-conventional natural gas output reached an all-time high. To help sustain these increases in domestic energy production, the Obama administration should back off its proposed tax hikes on the oil and gas industry and also accelerate the issuance of new permits for both deep- and shallow-water drilling in the Gulf of Mexico.

“The terrible Japanese accident should cause a serious and substantial timeout for nuclear power. Germany and China are taking actions that are prudent. The United States response so far has been vague other than the study ordered by President Obama with a so-far undefined charter and a review of seismic.

A study is all to the good, but we already have studies that indicate steps to greatly reduce some of the most serious risks. A 1997 Brookhaven National Laboratory Study concluded that the damage from spent fuel pools at closed boiling water reactors could range from $700 million up to $546 billion (yes, billion) – or up to about $700 billion in today’s dollars. But the NRC did not order that these spent fuel pools be emptied. A 2006 National Academies study, examining risk to spent fuel pools from terrorist attacks, estimated that the very scenario know unfolding horrifically in Japan could happen here and recommended that spent fuel pools be emptied as much as possible and the fuel rods put into dry storage (fresh spent fuel must be kept underwater for a few years so pools at operating plants cannot be completely emptied until a few years after the reactor ceases operation). The NRC has also refused to implement that advice as well. It seems reluctant to impose these costs on nuclear utilities, even though they would greatly reduce the risk of meltdowns and fires and also the consequences of potential accidents or attacks, should they happen, and even though nuclear power plants are mostly depreciated cash cows for their owners – costly to build, relatively cheap to operate.

A study may indentify other measures, such as shoring up seismic defenses at some plants, but the ordering dry storage, in hardened configuration, of all spent fuel at closed power plants, as Germany has done for some time, and implementing the same for as much spent fuel as possible at operating power plants.”

Even the most hardcore opponents of nuclear power understand that the story of what happened at the Fukushima Dalichi power plant was not about a design flaw or a human error. It is not a story about nuclear energy, but a story about a horrific natural disaster. The very important sub-plot is how the people of Japan face this disaster and come back even stronger, even more united, and even more able to contribute to the culture and the wealth of the entire world.

Indeed, nuclear energy does have a role here. Nuclear energy has played an important part in making Japan one of the most powerful economies on earth, and it will, in all likelihood, fuel the country’s return to an even more prominent place on the world stage.

Here in the United States, nuclear energy is one of the very few aspects of energy policy where the House of Representatives and the Senate, where progressives and conservatives, where Republicans and Democrats can find agreement. Nearly everyone understands that nuclear energy must play a part in our carbon efficient energy future, and our journey to that future will require a robust very diverse mix of both traditional fuels and alternative fuels. Whether one classifies nuclear as traditional or alternative, it would be foolish and foolhardy to think of keeping it out of the mix.

Progress is, all too often, a matter of taking advantage of even unexpected opportunities. This week’s Fukushima Dalichi incident may be an opportunity to improve on the already very good; a chance to learn how to mitigate the risk and to reduce the impact of these very, very rare occurrences.

In the energy business, sustainability, affordability, reliability, and safety should continue to be our goals. Continuous improvement should remain to be our strategy. A prosperous world economy should be our mission.