Austria, Venezuela, France and Spain are revising safety of their nuclear plants. South Korea will continue developing atomic energy.

The city of Vienna, in midst of the dramatic situation in Japan, plans strengthening their anti-nuclear policy and proposes a plan for abandoning nuclear energy.

Vienna's Executive City Councillor for the Environment Ulli Sima, which is the capital of Austria as well as one of nine provinces, presented her plan on Wednesday, which foresees as an emergency measure a moratorium on nuclear plants’ construction, followed by removal of all insecure reactors from the grid.

At a press conference, she pointed out that the means from the European Atomic Energy Community (Euratom), the organisation that, among other things, coordinates EU members’ safety standards for the use of atomic energy, should be redirected towards turning off the nuclear plants.

Venezuela is suspending development of a nuclear power program following the catastrophe at a nuclear complex in Japan, President Hugo Chavez said on Tuesday.

Chavez said events in Japan after last Friday's 9.0-magnitude earthquake and the tsunami that followed it showed the risks associated with nuclear power were too great, the Reuters reported.

Japan's nuclear crisis that deepened Wednesday with another fire at a quake-hit atomic power plant actuated countries all over the world to re-inspect their own nuclear plants. France and Spain have made some concrete steps in that sense.

In France, the heads of both houses of parliament ordered a legislative investigation into "the future of the French nuclear industry."

An emergency meeting scheduled Wednesday in the lower house of parliament was to include the chiefs of nuclear reactor builder Areva and Electricite de France, the world's biggest operator of nuclear plants, the AFP reported.

In the same time, Spain will carry out security checks at all its six plants.

Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero told reporters Wednesday that studies have been commissioned to determine how vulnerable his country's six nuclear plants are to earthquakes or flooding.

European Union energy officials agreed Tuesday to apply stress tests on plants across the bloc and Germany moved to switch off seven aging reactors.