Our hearts and prayers continue to go out to the people of Japan in the wake of the earthquake and tsunami. It's natural that such a cataclysmic event would immediately affect policy and economics, especially concerning nuclear power.

It will be days or weeks before the full extent is known of the damage to several Japanese nuclear reactors from the magnitude 9.0 quake. As of press time, fuel rods reportedly were melting in three reactors, apparently going into "meltdown."

CNN reported, "The Japan nuclear power plant crisis prompted German Chancellor Angela Merkel to rethink a plan to extend the lifespan of her country's nuclear power plants, Merkel said Monday. 'The events in Japan have shown us that even things that seem all but impossible scientifically can, in fact, happen,' Merkel said."

Germany has 17 reactors, all scheduled to be shut down by 2020. Other nuclear-power countries, including France, Canada, South Korea and Russia, are reassessing their programs. Several dozen demonstrators in Paris on Monday demanded France end its dependence on nuclear power.

Rep. Ed Markey, D-Mass., long a critic of nuclear power, used the crisis to call for a moratorium on new nuclear power construction in this country. Nuclear-related U.S. stocks, such as Exelon and Entergy, fell in Monday trading.

All these events occur as President Barack Obama has been trying to jump-start America's nuclear reactor program as part of his clean energy policy.

The Japanese tragedy "certainly helps those who are anti-nuclear energy," Jack Spencer told us; he's a nuclear-energy research fellow at the Heritage Foundation. However, he said, in Japan, "(R)eactor containment is working. I think the Japanese operators will work this to a conclusion. The reactor vessels were engineered for precisely this kind of situation. If they carry out the function they were meant to, the damage should be contained."

The oldest reactor at Fukushima I, the plant with the most danger of melting down, is 41 years old. "Existing reactors are very safe," Spencer said. "But each generation of nuclear reactors is even safer." He said that, unlike earlier models, today's reactors include "passive safety mechanisms" that shut down automatically should problems arise.

This is an example of the tough policy choices that sometimes must be made. On the one hand, the policies of the Obama administration demand "clean" energy with little or no greenhouse gases emitted. "Alternative" energies, such as wind, solar, geothermal and biomass, are a very small percentage of current production, and unlikely to rise higher without expensive tax subsidies. Limiting the production of coal or clean natural-gas plants only drives energy production to other countries.

And nuclear plants, as we're reminded again, have their own problems.

From our free-market perspective, we don't see anything wrong with developing the newest designs of nuclear power, provided there are no subsidies, and proper safety precautions are taken. That debate is just beginning.

REPRINTED FROM THE ORANGE COUNTY REGISTER.