Japan's nuclear lessons for U.S.

As Japan slowly and reluctantly acknowledges the dire scope of its nuclear reactor disaster at Fukushima, that gradually unfolding account has heightened the political and emotional fallout here. It's in our best interest to get past the fear and the politics, and to figure out how to make America's existing nuclear plants -- and any future ones -- much safer.

We're busy helping Japan right now, as we should. But we also have to focus on our own industry. President Barack Obama has directed the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to do a comprehensive review of all nuclear plants -- a good first step. And Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo has restated his concerns about how difficult it would be to evacuate the City of New York if there were an accident at the Indian Point plant, north of the city.

The Japan event won't cause a shutdown of many of our existing 65 plants, with 104 reactors, in 31 states. But any momentum for a nuclear renaissance -- an expansion beyond the 20 percent of the nation's electricity that nuclear now produces -- is going to slow to a crawl.

The firm that runs the crippled plant, Tokyo Electric Power Co., was to have been an investor in two new reactors in Texas. That plan is now expected to fall by the wayside, and it clearly won't be the only nuclear expansion proposal to suffer that fate. Talk of more reactors in upstate Oswego is likely to become a whisper.

So we have to concentrate on safety at existing plants. Tsunamis, like the one that did so much damage in Japan, are not the only threats to reactors. Human error and insufficiently vigilant regulation also compromise safety.

So far, except for the Three Mile Island accident in Pennslyvania in 1979, we've been lucky in this country. And we've been lucky, with an asterisk, on Long Island. The luck, with help from the forces that closed the Shoreham nuclear plant (including former Gov. Mario Cuomo): We don't have to worry now about Shoreham -- which had a design like the one in Japan, but never went into full operation -- or about the other nuclear plants that the former Long Island Lighting Co. wanted to build on the Island. The asterisk: We're all still paying more than $3 billion in Shoreham debt.

The nation's one big accident, in 1979, awoke us to nuclear danger, but it wasn't lethal. So our nuclear industry cites the ongoing lack of deaths as evidence that nuclear power is safe. But there have been some close calls.

Last year alone, a report released Thursday by the Union of Concerned Scientists shows, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission made 14 special inspections in response to a range of unusual events at plants. The report calls them near-misses.

The scientists credit the NRC for doing an excellent job in some cases: persistently asking the right questions and forcing plant operators to fix what's wrong. In other cases, it finds fault. At Indian Point Unit 2 on the Hudson River, NRC inspectors found a water leak in a part of the plant used for refueling. The report said it has been leaking "2 to 20 gallons a minute since at least 1993," but NRC managers "dismissed" the problem.

So a top priority must be for Congress and the president to oversee the overseers, to make sure the agency is setting operational safety standards high enough and forcing plant operators to meet them. We have to be sure that the redundant systems at plants are really adequate emergency backups. We also have to scrutinize the agency's findings that plants can withstand more powerful earthquakes than their region has ever experienced.

Take Indian Point, for example.

Cuomo has long insisted that it's too big a risk to stay open, though replacing the electricity it generates would be difficult. He repeated that this past week, after an MSNBC report that the NRC places Indian Point 3 at No. 1 on its list of reactors most at risk of earthquake-induced failure. So Indian Point and other plants at risk of earthquakes, such as San Onofre and Diablo Canyon in California, must be scrutinized far more closely.

We must also continue the search for better ways to store the dangerously radioactive spent fuel. There are 60,000 tons or more of that fuel in this country, the vast majority of it sitting in water-cooled pools like those failing in Japan.

One proposed solution is permanent storage in a vast geological formation, but Obama has killed the plan to store waste at Yucca Mountain, Nev. We should take warning from the fires and explosions at the spent-fuel pools in Japan, and work harder on finding better, less dangerous waste solutions.

If, as expected, nuclear expansion slows even more, we need to speed up development of the renewable fuels that carry less acute risk than a nuclear plant failure and less chronic health costs than fossil fuels -- and work a lot harder on energy efficiency, the least risky power source of them all.

Meanwhile, existing nuclear plants must be held to the highest health and safety standards. There's a role in that for the industry and for vigorous government regulation. The event in Japan is tragic, but the tragedy for us will be if we fail to learn from it to make our own plants safer.