Our world has been shocked in recent days by the damage that a tsunami caused at a nuclear power plant in Japan. Appropriately, countless scientists, public officials and ordinary citizens in Japan, the United States and throughout the world have been reassessing nuclear dangers.
We have been assured that the Tennessee Valley Authority has applied every prudent safety measure at our local Sequoyah Nuclear Plant and elsewhere throughout the TVA area. And it is sensible that the whole subject is being re-examined. We want safety first, and service.
But U.S. Sen. Lamar Alexander, R-Tenn., made some important points at a Senate committee meeting Wednesday.
“Twenty percent of our electricity in the United States comes from nuclear power; 70 percent of our clean electricity comes from nuclear power,” he said. “So it’s hard for me to imagine how we have a future in the United States without substantial expansion of nuclear power.”
The senator fittingly reminded, “The 104 civilian reactors we have in the United States have never produced a fatality, and the Navy ships that have had nuclear reactors since the 1950s have never had a fatality from a reactor accident.”
While it is vital to “ask questions” and to act with sufficient caution, Alexander said, the United States has a safety record that remains unsurpassed “by any other form of energy production.”