Nuclear Energy

Re "Storing Nuclear Waste Over the Long Haul," letters, May 27: Ted Russell Neff misrepresents the commercial nuclear waste disposal problem and the energy benefits of gasohol. The radioactive leaks at Hanford are the unfortunate legacy of a quick and dirty disposal project, using thin-walled, ordinary steel containers, in the early days of the Cold War when the highest priority was producing more plutonium for more bombs. The Yucca Mountain project for the disposal of commercial nuclear waste has spent over $3.6 billion to ensure that the spent fuel will be completely isolated for hundreds of thousands of years.

Germany announced that it is abandoning a nuclear energy project on which it had already spent $2.6 billion, because regional authorities refuse to issue an operating license. Research Minister Heinz Riesenhuber said the decision, which ended years of political controversy, was taken because the authorities in the state of North Rhine-Westphalia refused to drop their opposition and would not issue the operating license for the Kalkar project.

Looking back, Joseph Cosgrove said he was naive to think that Sen. Barack Obama could require that nuclear power plant operators publicly disclose any radioactive releases. Cosgrove and others who live and work in the hamlet of Godley, Ill., sought help after discovering years after the fact that there had been releases from the nearby Braidwood Generating Station. Two years later, Obama's legislation, lobbied by one of his largest corporate backers, has stalled.

Try this one on for size: Nuclear power on a chip. Researchers around the world are developing devices smaller than the width of a human hair for all sorts of uses ranging from biochemical sensors to medical implants. But here's the hang-up. Nobody has been able to come up with a power source small enough to be compatible with such tiny micromechanical devices. Anyone who has lugged around a 1-pound laptop with a 5-pound battery should get the drift here.

U.S. experts are concerned that a nuclear accident similar to the Chernobyl catastrophe will occur in the Soviet Union in the next five years and will undermine efforts to promote nuclear power in the United States, Energy Secretary James D. Watkins said Wednesday. The Soviet Union still has 16 nuclear reactors of the type involved in the 1986 Chernobyl catastrophe, and their operations are "frightening," Watkins told Times reporters and editors at a breakfast session.

"The solution to our energy problems is conservation and renewable energy--not nuclear energy," says David Chatfield, spokesman for the Greenpeace environmental organization in California. He was responding to my inquiry about this week's seizure of his organization's protest boat, the Rainbow Warrior, by French commandos near France's nuclear testing area in the South Pacific.

KLEINENSIEL, Germany - When the German government shut down half the country's nuclear reactors after the Fukushima disaster in Japan, followed two months later by a pledge to abandon nuclear power within a decade, environmentalists cheered. A year later, however, criticism of the nuclear shutdown is emerging from a surprising source: some of the very activists who pushed for the phaseout. They say poor planning of the shutdown and political opportunism by the government have actually worsened the toll on the environment in Germany, and Europe, at least in the short term.

The president of Iran declared Saturday that his country had an "inalienable right" to develop nuclear energy and offered a role in its program to other nations and companies to show that it was not producing nuclear weapons. President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad refused to suspend Iran's uranium enrichment activities and his speech failed to convince the United States or European officials that Iran was serious about anything but stalling international action to halt its nuclear program.

This is the stuff of high comedy: While Newt Gingrich and fellow Republicans pinch pennies, threaten school lunches, food stamps and welfare benefits, Defense Secretary William J. Perry is busy offering Russians--old Communist Party and KGB hands, Evil Empire builders of less than a decade ago, killers in Chechnya today--millions of American taxpayers' dollars to stop the sale of light-water nuclear reactors to Iran. The plutonium in these reactors is useless in making nuclear bombs.

Surfers have been riding the thundering breakers of this beach since the days of the steam automobile, long before anyone cracked an atom to make electricity. Joe Higgs adopted this beach as his second home even before bulldozers scraped away 1.5 million cubic yards of sandstone bluff for the first of three nuclear reactors. He and the San Onofre nuclear plant are uneasy neighbors to this day, peering at each other through barbed-wire fencing. "I've learned to live with that.