Saying the nuclear crisis unfolding in Japan has exposed holes in the United States' nuclear safety foreign policy, lawmakers have offered a flurry of new bills intended to plug those leaks.

House lawmakers on Friday introduced three separate bills aimed at clamping down on nuclear safety, increasing international cooperation and abolishing nuclear weapons -- many of them targeting existing laws that now seem lax given the heightened anxiety surrounding nuclear security.

Concern stems from the ongoing crisis in Japan, where workers are still scrambling to stabilize the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear reactor complex, crippled by an earthquake and tsumani last month. The Japanese government is allowing Tokyo Electric Power Co. to discharge more than 11,000 tons of contaminated water from the radioactive waste treatment facility and units 5 and 6 into the Pacific Ocean, according to the International Atomic Energy Agency.

Rep. Howard Berman (D-Calif.), the ranking Democrat on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, said the crisis shows that the United States must be cautious in securing nuclear material around the globe. To that end, Berman introduced the "Nuclear Nonproliferation and Cooperation Act of 2011" on Friday to update an aged statute covering international civil nuclear cooperation accords.

"The nonproliferation conditions governing civil nuclear cooperation agreements with other countries have not been updated since 1978, and the world has changed immensely since then," Berman said in a statement.

Updating the statute will help balance the need for nuclear power with the goal of stopping terrorists from obtaining material for nuclear weapons, the congressman said. Berman also co-sponsored legislation that Foreign Affairs Chairwoman Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-Fla.) introduced Thursday to increase congressional oversight of nuclear cooperation agreements.

Congress has little oversight of such agreements because they automatically go into effect unless the opposition can secure veto-proof majorities in the Senate and House, Ros-Lehtinen said at a hearing last month (Greenwire, March 17).

While both Berman and Ros-Lehtinen's bills require all future nuclear cooperation agreements to include certain commitments from the partnering country not to conduct enrichment and reprocessing activities, only Ros-Lehtinen's legislation would require congressional approval for "noncontroversial renewals of existing agreements," Berman said.

Rep. Jeff Fortenberry (R-Neb.) introduced a separate bill Friday to strengthen an existing international nuclear safety treaty. Fortenberry's measure is a companion to a bill Democratic Sens. Daniel Akaka of Hawaii and Tom Carper of Delaware floated on March 18.

"As Japan's post-earthquake emergency shows, nuclear facilities remain vulnerable to natural and man-made disasters," Fortenberry said in a statement when the Senate bill was offered.

The companion bills call on the U.S. representative to the Convention on Nuclear Safety -- a multilateral treaty negotiated in the aftermath of the 1986 Chernobyl disaster to improve civilian nuclear power reactor safety -- to encourage member countries to evaluate their nuclear safety, to increase public information about safety efforts and to urge all countries with a nuclear power program to join the convention. The legislation also would require the federal government to draft a strategic plan for international cooperation on nuclear power safety.

Meanwhile, Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton (D-D.C.) said the United States should not have nuclear weapons and reintroduced a bill Friday that would require the United States to negotiate agreements to disable and dismantle the country's nuclear weapons by 2020. Funds for weapons would then be redirected to housing, health care, Social Security and environmental needs, Norton said in a statement. Norton has introduced the measure each session since 1994.

Norton applauded the Obama administration for reversing "years of dangerous increases in U.S. nuclear capacity during the George W. Bush administration" but added that the events in Japan reflect the need to "rid the world of nuclear weapons."