I noted last week:

Reuters reported yesterday:

U.S. regulators privately have expressed doubts that some of the nation’s nuclear power plants are prepared for a Fukushima-scale disaster, undercutting their public confidence since Japan’s nuclear crisis began, documents released by an independent safety watchdog group show.

Internal Nuclear Regulatory Commission e-mails and memos obtained by the Union of Concerned Scientists questioned the adequacy of the back-up plans to keep reactor cooling systems running if off-site power were lost for an extended period.

Those concerns seem to contrast with the confidence U.S. regulators and industry officials have publicly expressed after the world’s worst nuclear accident since Chernobyl began to unfold on March 11, UCS officials said on Wednesday.

“While the NRC and the nuclear industry have been reassuring Americans that there is nothing to worry about — that we can do a better job dealing with a nuclear disaster like the one that just happened in Japan — it turns out that privately NRC senior analysts are not so sure,” said Edwin Lyman, a UCS nuclear expert.