I take strong exception to Eric Teegarden’s diatribe in the Jan. 31 Herald against nuclear power. (Guest commentary, “Nuclear power isn’t clean or safe; it’s a menace.”)
He says that money being spent on nuclear power “is being stolen from renewable energy.” Actually both sources are being funded and both are needed. We can argue about the allocation, but we shouldn’t put all our eggs in one basket.
He states, “every nuclear power plant has the potential to become a nuclear bomb factory.” This is simply not true. To concentrate reactor grade fuel into bomb grade is a difficult, expensive process. It requires a facility that is totally different from a power plant. If anyone attempted to convert a power plant into a concentration plant to make bomb grade fuel, they would be caught in any casual inspection before the facility could be put into operation.
Mr. Teegarden goes on to state “A 1 gigawatt nuclear power plant produces 500 pounds of plutonium per year as a waste byproduct. It takes just 10 pounds of plutonium to build a Nagasaki-style atomic bomb.” This may be true, but the plutonium produced is well dispersed throughout the spent reactor fuel. Concentrating it to bomb grade would require a reprocessing plant, of which there are only a few in the world and none in the United States.
He states that conflicts of interest have led to decades of lax security and safety oversight. He doesn’t say anything about consequences of such laxity, because there haven’t been any. The safety systems in American nuclear plants have worked. Even at Three Mile Island the leakage was contained within the building and there were no health effects. Injecting Chernobyl into the argument is specious. Russian safety systems are simply not comparable to ours.
I do not mean to disparage renewable energy. It’s important, too. However, nuclear is not a menace and Teegarden’s shrill denunciation is not helpful.
John Carlin
Edmonds
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