Despite the tragic events from last week’s earthquake and tsunami in Japan, the U.S. Department of Energy is holding its position in support of nuclear power as a part of a responsible energy future, GigaOm’s Katie Fehrenbacher wrote in a recent blog post. The DOE’s Secretary Steven Chu said as much yesterday before the House Energy & Commerce committee.

In fact, the DOE Loan Program has issued a conditional commitment for a $8.33 billion loan guarantee to Georgia Power to build the first nuclear power plant in the U.S in three decades, and is moving ahead with other nuclear projects.

One has to wonder, though, how long the DOE can hold out as the loss of life continues to climb in Japan and the very real risk of nuclear meltdown persists. Fehrenbacher likens the Japan disaster to Three Mile Island, although not yet a Chernobyl, in her March 13 piece Here Comes the Backlash to Japan’s Nuclear Disaster. In that piece, Fehrenbacher asserts that beyond the public relations nightmare of the dangers associated with nuclear, costs are as much of a concern – not just to build the plants, but also to deal with any nuclear problems. Indeed, it’s hard to get a warm and fuzzy feeling about nuclear when you read what the Guardian has to say about the Japan disaster: “When experts decide it is necessary to flood reactors in the world’s most technologically advanced nation with an improvised flow of marine muck, people will ask whether the industry’s contingency planning for disaster is really as good as we are always being promised.”

Marine muck, indeed.