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I read your story on Ms. Livingston and the power plant and couldn't resist comment. If Ms. Livingston was so appalled by the power plant, she should have moved somewhere else. A woman as bright as she is must have known the power plant was there. She claims to be able to see the stacks from her windows! The idea of wind generation is great, but that would mean dotting the entire Massachusetts coastline with wind turbines. That won't happen because Ted Kennedy doesn't want them to blight his viewing of the Vineyard! You can't have it both ways.

Part 1 presented a new study by power plant cost expert Craig Severance that puts the generation costs for power from new nuclear plants at from 25 to 30 cents per kilowatt-hour - triple current U.S. electricity rates! Those ideologically promiscuous folks at the Heritage Foundation have replied with "New Study on Staggering Cost of Nuclear Energy, Staggeringly Pessimistic." Craig's point by point response follows a few of my comments. Heritage is a leader of the conservative movement stagnation. They have written "the only thing a green 'New Deal' will do is lead us down a Green Road to Serfdom," comparing such a policy to "collectivism in the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany," and their Senior Policy Analyst in Energy Economics and Climate Change is quite confused about both of the subjects he analyzes (see "Heritage even opposes energy efficiency").

A nuke power bailout must NOT be part of the hundreds of billions of federal dollars about to pour out of Washington to revive our Bush-whacked economy. If the huge Obama stimulus package we all know is coming includes money to build new reactors, the whole venture could turn to radioactive dust. This is the last gasp both for American prosperity and atomic energy. Nuke promoters are lobbying frantically to get some of that cash for a dying business in which Wall Street would not invest even before the last crash.

If a nuclear power plant is built in Fresno - a highly unlikely proposition - then radioactive waste from that plant could pass through Stockton and its port on the way to France for reprocessing. Scary. Twenty years ago this month, the Department of Energy was to have begun accepting spent nuclear reactor fuel and other radioactive waste at its Yucca Mountain Repository in the desert 80 miles north of Las Vegas. The Energy Department began studying Yucca Mountain 10 years earlier, in 1978.

When Barack Obama becomes America's 44th president on Jan. 20, he should embrace the vision of a predecessor who declared: "We seek the total elimination one day of nuclear weapons from the face of the Earth." That president was Ronald Reagan, and he expressed this ambitious vision in his second inaugural address on Jan. 21, 1985. It was a remarkable statement from a president who had deployed tactical nuclear missiles in Europe to counter the Soviet Union's fearsome SS-20 missile fleet. President Reagan knew the grave threat nuclear weapons pose to humanity. He never achieved his goal, but President Obama should pick up where he left off.

Let's get the health and safety answers before lifting the ban in Virginia The push for alternative power and energy independence has put Virginia on a fast track to exploring its uranium resources for use in nuclear power plants. In the 2008 legislative session, prompted by the man whose Pittsylvania County farm covers the largest known undeveloped deposit of uranium ore in the country, the Virginia Senate gave the go-ahead for a study by the National Academy of Sciences. The House Rules Committee nixed the plan, saying it needed more time to study the need for a study. The House's stall was understandable. In another bill, the Senate authorized the Department of Mines, Minerals and Energy to draw up regulations for uranium mining, which has been banned since 1983. These simultaneous proposals -- to conduct a study and to write regulations -- rather than having one inform the other, and the undue haste about lifting a 25-year ban combined to convey an undeniable sense of being railroaded.

I read your Dec. 4 editorial, "The nuclear option," with disappointment. You spoke of a small leak from a navy nuclear submarine and, in the final paragraph, somehow equated this to an "accident." This is hyperbole of the type usually seen only in the sloppiest of political campaigns. The radioactive leak, while unfortunate, likely was no larger than those of cruise ships that release waste from passengers who have undergone medical treatments. It most certainly was a smaller environmental impact than fossil fueled ships that circle the globe spewing and spilling noxious chemicals.

fossil fuels. Applications for new and extended reactor licenses are snowballing. Yet progress on a national nuclear dump site is virtually paralyzed. Late last month, California and Nevada filed a litany of challenges against a proposed nuclear-waste repository near Las Vegas, delivering another in a series of setbacks to this mega-billion dollar plan.

Your utility bills have carried a surcharge of $27 billion for nuclear power. The Nuclear Waste Policy Act of 1982 required nuclear power providers to contribute to the Nuclear Waste Fund, which funds were to build a Nuclear Waste Repository by 1998. This repository is yet to open, leaving our government open to lawsuits. Our government has spend $94 million defending itself against breach of contract resulting in a $420 million judgment for the plaintiffs. Outstanding liabilities are in the billions. Should the repository at Yucca Mountain become operational it could hold existing and future wastes from the nukes already built. Yucca Mountain could not hold the wastes from an expanded nuclear power industry. Wait! That's not all folks!

The Ontario government is ready to embark on a $26-billion mistake. The plan to have more than 50 per cent of our electricity needs met by nuclear power ignores history. No nuclear project in Ontario has come in on time and on budget, neither have they delivered the output promised. Costly overruns and repairs have saddled taxpayers with a $20-billion debt which appears on our electricity bill as a debt-reduction charge. One definition of insanity is to repeat something and expect a different result. Why would it be any different this time around?

So it looks like President-elect Obama is going to name his energy and environment team next week. Among the purported choices is Nobel-winning physicist Steven Chu to lead the Department of Energy. One of the questions on our minds is how will he handle nuclear energy policy. It is impossible to judge whether he'll make a good secretary of energy. He certainly has the technical background to know fission from fusion. But knowing the difference between cracking atoms and crashing them does not make a good energy secretary. The job will be to articulate and execute the policy vision set forth by President Obama. It is to be more of a manager and leader than a smarty-pants. After all, the law of comparative advantage says Dr. Chu might be better suited for a lab than the hot seat in the DOE offices.

Picture a world without a nuclear threat. A world where peace would reign supreme. A world where all nations worked together to keep their people safe from harm. This is the world that the Obama Administration is working toward. No doubt terrorism is a serious problem around the globe and one that need be dealt with even handedly by all nations who seek to keep their people safe. President-elect Obama has said that his Administration will work hard to bring our allies and foes back into the diplomatic fold. He has promised that with the world cooperating he would urge congress to set aside $1 Billion dollars to help remove nuclear warheads from vulnerable places and continue to press toward a nuclear free world. I applaud his efforts to work toward world peace and reconciliation.

To understand how the cleanup of Hanford depends on a nuclear waste repository in Nevada, work backward. Without the repository, there will be no permanent disposal of any of the nation's intensely radioactive reactor wastes. Opponents of the Yucca Mountain project talk vaguely of other possibilities, but there are no other possibilities in the real world. Yucca Mountain is more dry and isolated than any realistic alternative, and it's been studied to death for more than 20 years. Without permanent burial of reactor wastes, Hanford will be saddled with the radioactivity of 53 million gallons of waste now held in 177 steel tanks on the Eastern Washington reservation near the Tri-Cities.

During the presidential campaign, Republican candidate John McCain pledged to build 45 nuclear reactors by 2030 to meet the nation's energy needs. With just about everybody but the most ardent of global-warming deniers recognizing the negative impact that coal-fired plants are having on the environment, the proposal was appealing politically because it rolled energy independence and global warming into one package. It also was unrealistic. The United States has neither the manpower nor the materiel to construct that many nuclear power plants in that time period, and the companies that develop and design nuclear plants would face similar constraints. Clearing regulatory hurdles can take decades - and don't forget the NIMBY factor.

The greatest threat that a nuclear power plant poses to Saskatchewan people isn't necessarily to water usage or even to human life in the near-impossibility of a meltdown. The greatest threat is to our wallets -- and the Saskatchewan Party government needs to start coming clean about how serious its potential financial support of a reactor really is.

Proposal to increase nuke waste capacity in Nevada makes a bad idea worse On Tuesday the Energy Department asked Congress to pass legislation so the proposed high-level nuclear waste dump at Yucca Mountain could be built to handle far more of the deadly radioactive material than was intended when the site was first selected for study, in 1987. Congress had set a limit of 70,000 metric tons of waste for the site 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas but the department said in its report that Yucca Mountain "can be expanded to accommodate three times, or more, the current statutory limit." That is based on past studies that have suggested the dump, which is now proposed to encompass 1,250 acres, could be expanded to cover as much as 4,200 acres.

This week, President-elect Obama is expected to appoint a Secretary for the Department of Energy (DOE). This person will need some serious muscle: in addition to the enormous task of shifting the bureaucracy's entrenched focus away from nuclear weapons production toward the renewable energy priorities of the Obama Administration, they will also need to hold accountable the contractors who conduct 90 percent of the agency's work. Additionally, with a seat on the Nuclear Weapons Council, the Secretary will have to stand up against the well-organized offensive for the Bush Administration's failed Reliable Replacement Warhead (RRW) program. As Walter Pincus reported in the Washington Post last week, U.S. Strategic Commander Air Force Gen. Kevin P. Chilton is calling for a rush to develop and produce RRW because of alleged surety problems--a topic of serious controversy within the nuclear scientific community. Also, in the January/February edition of Foreign Affairs, Sec. of Defense Robert Gates again heralded RRW, without addressing the fact that RRW's test pedigree will be much less extensive than that of the existing stockpile.

The state Health Department has no business questioning the Legislature's authority to review changes the department made in the way it measures radiation released by Vermont Yankee. Advertisement Vermont is the only state in the nation whose Legislature has the power to deny a license extension to a nuclear power plant. That makes all matters relevant to the safe and reliable operation of the plant the lawmakers' concern.

As Canada's industrial centre, Ontario needs a lot of electricity. At one time, it got most of this power from water-driven turbines, hence the name Ontario Hydro. But the name has changed to the Ontario Power Authority, an indication of the province's increasing reliance on other sources of electricity, especially nuclear power. Because Ontario's demand continues to grow, it's assumed that supply must also continue to grow - and nuclear has been touted as the most reliable source of that increasing power. I've always thought it was crazy to plan on steady growth forever. It can't be maintained in a finite system such as our biosphere. Energy conservation makes a lot more sense, and it has been proven to be effective. After the rolling brownouts engineered in California by Enron in 2001, the state embarked on a conservation program that slashed usage and saved billions of dollars.

The pros and cons regarding Yucca mountain are endless. It was in the late 1980s when all eyes were turned toward the State of Nevada - think about it - a small state with two new senators. There was Texas and the state of Washington with powerful leadership, as compared to our own little state of Nevada. Included in this mixture was the powerful nuclear industry pushing all the way to Nevada and Yucca Mountain. There are advantages to Yucca Mountain in that it is in a remote area along side the Nevada test site, wherein there had been nuclear testing. Think about human exposure over the next 10,000 years. Fractured rock that will provide a path down to the water table. Think also about the mountain as it sits quietly at this moment in isolation, but we have had earthquakes and this area is located in the southwestern Nevada volcanic field. There are a maze of faults and fractures beneath this mountain which make it difficult to model flow pathways.