Follow-up letters vs. heads of state on nuclear technopolitics

Recent major-newspaper articles on nuclear technopolitics, both reported in this venue, have drawn a pair of letter-to-the-editor responses that merit noticing.

According to George F. Steeg, a citizen in Potomac Falls, Virginia, the Wall Street Journal editorial board's early and strongly negative reaction to plans to close German nuclear plants needed even more strength. The editors had predicted that the "prospects of solar or wind energy filling [Germany's post-nuclear energy] gap are dim." Steeg's letter calls that "an understatement," and continues:

Germany generates around a quarter of its electricity from nuclear power, some 20,500 megawatts. Renewable energy accounts for 17%, or 15,300 megawatts. To make up the difference, Germany would need to put thousands of wind turbines in the North and Baltic seas, farmland and forests—and even then, it would be hard to make up the deficit. My friends in Germany tell me another green fad is to cover North Africa with solar panels and run electric power cables under the Mediterranean. As a physicist, Chancellor Angela Merkel should be ashamed by these ludicrous proposals.

In the Washington Post, an above-the-fold front-page article reviewed the controversy over the long-delayed and now canceled—officially, anyway—nuclear-waste repository at Yucca Mountain, Nevada, a topic also recently engaged by a Post editorial. The news article has led to a letter from Barry M. Hartman, an attorney arguing against the Obama administration's Yucca-closure decision. Hartman complains that the Post's story "omitted the most troublesome aspect of the controversy surrounding the nuclear waste site." He continues:

The long-festering questions of where and how to dispose of spent nuclear fuel were resolved by Congress when it passed the 1982 Nuclear Waste Policy Act. That law selected Yucca Mountain as the site and requires that the Energy Department follow a time-sensitive process to decide if it can be used safely. That process, though controversial, has been successfully implemented for 25 years.

Hartman asserts that "the president (and apparently the Nuclear Regulatory Commission) wants to abandon the Yucca Mountain project for political reasons" and declares that it "is now up to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia to decide if the law will prevail over politics."

Steve Corneliussen

Steven T. Corneliussen, a media analyst for the American Institute of Physics, monitors three national newspapers, the weeklies Nature and Science, and occasionally other publications. His reports to AIP are collected each Friday for "Science and the media." He has published op-eds in the Washington Post and other newspapers, has written for NASA's history program, and is a science writer at a particle-accelerator laboratory.