Nuclear Energy California

Physician Gale may be an expert in cancer treatment, but as a layman on alternative energy, he should get his facts straight. Photovoltaics has been used reliably since the late 1950s for space power, and since the 1970s it has become a viable, pollution-free, quiet alternative energy source that uses only sunlight as fuel. Present and future technologies do not cause a loss in lives nor do they produce toxic wastes. Such solid waste as sodium silicate that results from the chemical etching of silicon is as inert as beach sand and does not represent "toxic waste that is comparable or greater in magnitude as nuclear energy."

The newspaper's front page contained one of those jigsaws of incongruity that one expects these days in California: One article reported that the California Independent System Operator had just declared the latest in a long series of Stage 2 electricity alerts while another reported on workers merrily dismantling the Rancho Seco nuclear electricity generating plant near Sacramento. Those two stories form the bookends of this state's energy crisis.