It’s been 34 years — and several nuclear accidents later — but a divided federal panel on Thursday licensed a utility to build nuclear reactors in the U.S. for the first time since 1978.
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s chairman, Gregory Jaczko, opposed licensing the two reactors at this time even though he had earlier praised their design.
“There is still more work” to be done to ensure that lessons learned from Japan’s Fukushima disaster last year are engrained in the reactor design, he told his colleagues.
Full story: US licenses first nuclear reactors since 1978