Letter: Nuclear power plants are safe, clean?

Mark Walker possibly has forgotten to include the danger of the mining of uranium, hauling to a processing plant, the manufacturing of the fuel rods and shipping to nuclear power plants, all carbon intensive and dangerous activities and use much water resources.

Sources and shares of total U.S. purchases of uranium in 2020 were: Canada 22%, Kazakhstan 2%, Russia 16%, Australia 11%, Uzbekistan 8%, Namibia 5%, U.S. and five other countries combined 14%. How do we think it gets here? Nuclear will not make us less dependent on foreign suppliers.

The spent rods are still being stored on site and the number of spent rods being stored has been increased per nuclear power plant. Dry cast storage is being proposed as being "safer." The documentation of the failed containment efforts at the Hanford Site should raise some questions. The leaking of radioactive material, due to corrosion of containers, has probably reached the Columbia River by now. According to the Union of Scientists, Nuclear Energy consumes roughly 400 gallons of water per megawatt-hour, 320 billion gallons of water by United States nuclear power plant electricity generation in 2015.

Nuclear power plants by their nature have controlled releases of radiation into the air, as well as in the water and it is invisible unlike smog.

No one is advising that energy from fossil fuel or nuclear production, come to a screeching halt, but we should have been moving away from these strategies at least 40 years ago. In 1972, I toured two homes that were completely off the grid. The owners were a physicist and an engineer, who both worked at Fermi. They employed passive solar, geothermal and more. I had an atrium that would heat my whole 2,600-foot home, on a sunny winter day. Much is possible, unless we don't try

Linda Sickles

Warrenville