To the Editor:
The nuclear industry is bamboozling the Environmental Protection Agency into its agenda of promoting nuclear power as “clean” (“E.P.A. Wrestles With Role of Nuclear Plants in Carbon Emission Rules,” Business Day, Dec. 26). It is no secret that every nuclear power plant regularly emits low-level radiation into the environment. Why focus only on carbon emissions while ignoring iodine-129, plutonium-239, cesium-135 and other lethal radionuclides?
The nuclear industry wants us to focus narrowly on the fission process and to ignore the footprint of mining, milling, enrichment, processing and storing of nuclear fuel.
It also wants us to ignore the elephant in the room: its inability to rid the planet of high-level nuclear waste that accumulates every hour that any nuclear power plant is operating. The latest plan of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission in effect to turn every nuclear power plant in the country into a nuclear waste dump is shocking indeed.
The bottom line is very simple: Nuclear power is the most expensive, the most unreliable, the most dangerous and the most environmentally damaging of all forms of energy production.
ROGER JOHNSON
San Clemente, Calif., Dec. 26, 2014
Unclean Nuclear Energy - NYTimes.com
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