The 60,000 people on the streets of Stuttgart this weekend protesting about Germany’s plans to extend the lives of ten nuclear power plants should leave the energy world in no doubt that events in Japan will have an impact on the nuclear industry everywhere.

Soon after the first explosion at the Fukushima nuclear plant on Saturday, politicians have been hurriedly backtracking on their commitments to the nuclear industry.

In the US, Senator Joe Lieberman told CBS’ Face the Nation:

I don’t want to stop the building of nuclear power plants. But I think we’ve got to kind of quietly put, quickly put, the brakes on until we can absorb what has happened in Japan as a result of the earthquake and the tsunami and then see what more, if anything, we can demand of the new power plants that are coming online.