On May 2, the Atlantic Council held a conversation with Vaclav Bartuska, Special Envoy for Energy Security, Czech Republic, on the future of nuclear power and how the Japanese nuclear crisis has caused some, but not all, in Europe to reconsider their attitudes toward this source of energy.

From John Vincour, the International Herald Tribune:  Two thoughts about Angela Merkel’s weekend of political debacle

It appeared to be the first global storm since World War II, a commingling of unrelated disasters.

For Japan, it was 9/11-plus, the worst disaster since U.S. atomic bombs leveled Hiroshima and Nagasaki 65 years ago and sealed the end of the second world war in the 20th century.

From Reuters:  Russia said on Wednesday that NATO should investigate last year's computer virus attack on a Russian-built nuclear reactor in Iran, saying the incident could have triggered a nuclear disaster on the scale of Chernobyl.

From Selcuk Golokuk and Tulay Karadeniz, Reuters:  Turkey and China aim to treble bilateral trade to $50 billion a year by 2015 and to $100 billion by 2020 under a new "strategic partnership", the prime ministers of the two countries said on Friday.

"We should build a new framework for civil nuclear cooperation, including an international fuel bank, so that countries can access peaceful power without increasing the risks of proliferation. ... We must harness the power of nuclear energy on behalf of our efforts to combat climate change, and to advance peace and opportunity for all people."

Can Europe trust Turkey when it comes to energy security any more than we can trust Ukraine?

From RIA Novosti:  The sites for two new nuclear power plants, in Russia's Kaliningrad exclave and in Belarus, were selected with no environmental assessment and without consulting neighboring countries, Lithuania's president said on Monday.