The Obama administration has ruled out making any change in its policy with regard to atomic power plants or put a moratorium on new constructions in view of Japanese experience wherein several nuclear power plants have been damaged in the massive earthquake that hit the country last week.
In view of the Japanese experience, the Deputy Energy Secretary, Mr Dan Poneman, said the US is going to continue to make sure that each and every one of nuclear reactors in the US those sources is as safe as is humanly possible.
“We will continue to take all learning into account as we proceed from episodes that happened, from hypothetical that we might be able to come up with. It’s a matter of our continuous approach to our own development of our energy resources to make sure that they’re done continuously and safely.
Each event as it occurs is taken into account, but we don’t sort of change from day to day our overall approach to the desire to diversify our overall energy posture,” he said.
There are 104 operating reactors comprising one-fifths of electricity of the US; 70 per cent of the carbon-free electricity in the US comes from nuclear power.
“So we do see nuclear power as continuing to play an important role in building a low-carbon future. But be assured that we will take the safety aspect of that as our paramount concern,” Mr Poneman said.
“From a policy perspective, we will continue to operate our reactors and seek to operate them safely. We will continue to seek to build nuclear into a part of a responsible energy future, and we will repose our confidence in the NRC to make sure that we only do so to the extent that it can be done safely,” he said.
Nuclear energy remains a part of the overall energy plan of the US President, Mr Barack Obama, when he talks about reaching a clean energy standard it’s a vital part of that.
“As we get more information about Japan and what happened there, that can be incorporated. But right now, we remain committed to the clean energy standard and the other aspects of the President’s energy plan,” the White House Press Secretary, Mr Jay Carney, said.
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