Regarding “Stuck in 1979/Foes keep distorting nuclear power’s record” (Editorial, March 21):
People are afraid of what they don’t understand. The generation of nuclear power could prove to be one of mankind’s greatest hopes for solving the global warming crisis. Critics and politicians like Assemblyman Lloyd Levine site Chernobyl and Three Mile Island as cases against nuclear power, but no one can argue that fossil fuels are the real threat: pollution and carbon emissions kill about 4.5 million people a year, 20,000 of those in the United States, while nuclear power mishaps have claimed less than 5,000 lives in the last 50 years.
The problem isn’t so much the safety of nuclear power plants — although politics and bureaucracy have made it too much trouble to build any new ones — but what to do with the spent fuel. Sites such as Yucca Mountain are so mired in political bureaucracy and misunderstanding that they may never serve their intended purpose: to store waste from the world’s 441 nuclear power plants, and do it as safely and permanently as humans can manage at this point in history. (European nations have an even better idea: reprocess the waste.)
Compared with the loss of life resulting from global warming, nuclear energy may be the answer we’ve been looking for all along. But how can we expect people to understand it when our own president can’t even pronounce it?
Signed,
Jason Watkins
