Nuclear power can help climate battle

To the Editor:

I wish Iggy Azalea would stop rapping about her immense buttocks and start rapping about fighting climate change.  I wish people would stop driving SUV’s and switch to hybrids and electric cars. I wish India and China would stop opening up coal-burning plants at the rate of one per week. 

I wish Poland, Australia, Kentucky, West Virginia and Wyoming would stop mining coal. We are destroying our planet for the sake of vanities and trivialities. 

This brings me to Jennifer Scarlott’s condemnation of my position on nuclear power in a recent Riverdale Press. She makes many valid points. Nuclear power has the potential for disaster. It has demonstrated that in all too terrible ways at Chernobyl and Fukushima.  

I would personally prefer that all countries move to wind and solar power and other renewable energy sources that don’t spew any carbon dioxide. 

However, our own very powerful oil, gas and coal power companies clearly have a problem with that, which is perhaps the biggest reason we don’t have a viable policy to combat climate change. 

I hope nuclear power becomes unnecessary. West Virginia, Kentucky, Texas, North Dakota, the Republican Party, the Koch brothers, Exxon Mobil, and the other usual suspects will fight to the death with their considerable resources to keep producing and using coal and oil. 

Economic forces or the Federal government will have to make coal and oil so expensive that the markets for these products die. I still believe nuclear power can help produce decent jobs for people to replace the jobs that will be lost due to the hoped-for phasing out of oil and coal production, if we cannot quickly bring viable renewable energies to market (if the nuclear technology can be built with far better safeguards than it has now — a big “if,” I know). 

As to Ms. Scarlott’s point that people will have to settle for a lower standard of living, this is not a winning argument for helping to persuade millions of Americans to fight climate change by changing their lifestyles and habits.