Great article by Gwyneth Cravens at Bloomberg Businessweek, starting to address the true lessons to learn from Fukushima:

The technical community will review the Japanese nuclear crisis and recommend improvements. Although the reactors properly shut down with the first jolt, the cascade of difficulties brought by the tsunami overwhelmed the site.

In any case, that 1966 plant is outmoded. Modern ones have redundant passive-safety features that would have ensured Fukushima’s stability. These innovations are partly thanks to lessons learned about oversight and human engineering from the meltdown at Three Mile Island. U.S. plants are continuously upgraded, and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission will be instituting new improvements and encouraging other countries to follow suit.

And she mentions this ultimate key point, that even though it is less visible than the Fukushima crisis, the health and environmental hydrocarbon crisis is ever-present now and needs an ultimate solution:

We are all suffering from a health and environmental catastrophe being unleashed by hydrocarbon combustion. By 2030, power demand is expected to almost double. If we are to keep the lights on while reducing harm to humans and the planet, nuclear power must grow and fossil-fuel power must shrink.

Robert W. Gee, President, Gee Strategies Group

With the world’s eyes on the unfolding crisis at the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear complex, questions about the use of nuclear energy here in the United States are swirling. Even as these questions are perfectly reasonable and worthy of discussion, it is also important to remember to proceed rationally, rather than react impulsively. Because this is a teachable moment, we can and should learn from this unfolding situation before we decide how – or whether — to revise America’s current stewardship of nuclear energy.

Nuclear energy is an important part of the country’s energy mix, constituting fully 20 percent of America’s energy resources. Each of our country’s energy resources has its advantages and disadvantages but the paramount factor in the use of any of these alternatives is safety.

The situation in Japan is changing daily, and continues to demonstrate incremental progress. Until this matter is fully resolved, we encourage policy makers and the public to remain calm, rational and focused to learn the right lessons and use them to make clear-headed decisions about America’s energy future. In the ongoing task of providing ourselves with the safest, most effective means to power our lives, we ought not leave ourselves in the dark.

With a priority of safety first, we should look, listen, and learn from this crisis prior to making any significant decisions affecting our own country’s energy future. By using this event as an as an opportunity to fully assess what has happened in Japan and apply that knowledge here, at the very least we should be able to make nuclear power systems here even safer.