Editor’s note: Marvin Fertel is president and CEO of the Nuclear Energy Institute, which is a policy organization for the nuclear energy industry.
(CNN) — The Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant crisis in Japan understandably caused many Americans to worry and ask: Could that happen here? It’s the most frequent question I’ve received in the past two weeks.
The answer is twofold: First, one can never entirely rule out the possibility of a natural disaster battering even a super-hardened industrial facility. That’s why the independent Nuclear Regulatory Commission has strict standards and why the industry exceeds them for safety, security and emergency preparedness at U.S. reactors.
Second, because it would be foolish to rule out such possibilities, the U.S. nuclear energy industry will do what it has done since the Three Mile Island accident 32 years ago — apply the lessons learned from Fukushima to make American nuclear energy facilities even safer than they are today.
This is, in fact, already happening.
Continue reading at “U.S. nuclear plants safe and will apply lessons from Japan crisis”.
