Thursday, May 20, 2010

Nuclear: The Life-Saving Alternative?

This column originally appeared in the Williston Observer on May 20, 2010.

Nuclear: The Life-Saving Alternative?

You may or may not have ever heard of Adam Carolla — he's a radio personality who also hosted The Man Show on cable's Comedy Central and co-hosted Loveline, a sex and relationship advice show, with Dr. Drew Pinsky. Recently, tech website Gizmodo.com asked Carolla his opinions on a topic I've written about here before: nuclear power.

Normally, I would not use someone like Carolla as entree into a column topic, but what he had to say, in just a few minutes, was spot-on (though crude — if you look for Carolla's video at Gizmodo, be sure to watch once the kids are in bed).

The interview was posted days after the Deepwater Horizon disaster in the Gulf of Mexico and a month after the Massey coal mine disaster in West Virginia. Regarding nuclear power, Carolla asks this pointed question: after 11 people died drilling for oil and nearly 30 died digging for coal in just the last month, exactly how many people have died producing nuclear power in the United States in the past month, or year, or decade?

His answer is zero. If we were to choose a way to produce power solely on the safety of the workers behind that power, nuclear is the clear choice.

Now, Carolla was riffing, and didn't stop to think that uranium is also mined (albeit by non-Americans). There are dangers to uranium mining, not the least of which is exposure to radioactive dust and radon gas. But these are risks that can (and should) be mitigated. Coal miners, though, are never quite sure if they will emerge from the mine when the make their way in.

Environmentally, the threat posed by offshore oil drilling is no longer just a threat — it is about as real as it can get. So real, in fact, that President Obama is having second thoughts about his plans to allow more such drilling, as is California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Coal mining is no friend of the environment either, especially when the mountaintop removal method is used. Just think about that — removal of a mountaintop so we can burn the coal that the mountain is made of.

There are dangers, to be sure, in nuclear power. The last two years of news out of Vermont Yankee show that mistakes can and will be made; this is not to mention Three Mile Island and Chernobyl. These lessons cannot be fogotten.

These are, however, extreme examples. Given what we have learned since the last nuclear power plant in the United States came on line in 1996, and what other countries have learned, we know we can build safe, effective plants that can not only produce massive amounts of power in a relatively small space, but which can also reuse their own fuel, recycling it instead of sending if off for permanent storage.

Our power needs are growing and will continue to grow. Just imagine if electricity was clean, bountiful, and cheap. Just imagine quantum-leap discoveries in battery technology that would make the electric car ubiquitous. Just imagine if we no longer need fossil fuels to produce electricity nor run our cars.

If we redouble our efforts to bolster our reliance on renewables, continuing to improve solar cell efficiency and continuing to build wind farms in the right places, that will help. But what will also help is for we, as a nation, to decide that nuclear power must be a part of that future, too.

------------

I want to take this opportunity to bid farewell, on these pages, to Mike Benevento. I have had the pleasure of writing opposite him for a year. Our point and counterpoint columns have reaffirmed to me that it not only possible to have civil discussions about matters we disagree on, it is absolutely essential.

In the end, we share a love for this country and its democracy. We both know that there are a few things that are essential to our freedoms: a free press, freedom of expression, freedom of speech, and a system of government that allows for the peaceful and orderly transfer of power. Most likely, you reading this also share these values.

I look forward to debating the finer points of politics and the world with someone new. But be warned - you do have some large shoes to fill.

Saturday, May 8, 2010

The F-35 and the Cost of Safety

This column originally appeared in the Williston Observer on May 6, 2010.

The F-35 and the Cost of Safety

Back in October of 1988, I wrote a story for the Vermont Cynic about the Atlas nuclear missile sites in northern Vermont, including one in Alburgh. This story was close to my heart, because for years I'd driven by the Alburgh site, as it was at the end of a back road between my family's camp in Alburgh Springs and Alburgh Town.

When I went to interview a neighboring property owner in 1988, a time of relative fear of nuclear holocaust, I asked how he felt when the government put the missile in place. Surely they were scared to death about having such a powerful weapon buried just a few feet under the ground.

The owner's response was, "Well, I guess it's scary if you think about it now, but back then, all we knew was that missile was there to keep us safe."

When I was in the National Guard, my home armory was in the middle of a neighborhood in Swanton. We kept our jeeps, trucks, and M60A3 tank in the motor pool, separated from the neighbors by just a chain link fence. The armory, like Williston's today, was used for community purposes as well as for the military - a preschool used our classrooms during the school year.

But come training days, when we had to start up those vehicles, we did so knowing that we were disturbing the peace. The engine of an M60A3 is anything but quiet, and after a few months sitting idle, it could throw off thick, black exhaust that would blanket the neighborhood. Once, so I'm told, someone hit the switch on the tank's smoke generator. Having experienced the thick, white smoke on training battlefields, I could only imagine what the neighborhood looked like.

I'm certain that on training days, our neighbors watched us warily, so they could be prepared for the billowing exhaust, the roar of the engine, and the loud squeak of the tracks as we maneuvered the nearly 50-ton monster around our grounds. Perhaps those neighbors also had the feeling that despite the inconvenience, we were there to help keep them safe.

When my family and I moved to Williston, we lived on North Brownell Road. We quickly found that our home, like the Lamplight Acres neighborhood across the street from us, was on the landing path of some flights flown by the Vermont Air National Guard. The first few fly-overs were a surprise to us, as we had quickly learned that civilian planes rarely ever flew overhead.

By the next summer, the loud whine of the jets' engines were just background noise, and it was actually exciting to see the jets fly so low over our house that you could see the pilots and hear the hydraulics whine as the pilot worked the controls.

When the kids asked what the loud noise was, the sentiment expressed by that Alburgh property owner always came to mind. That plane, that noise, was telling us that someone was up there to keep us safe.

Having experienced living on the landing path of F-16s hardly compares to those who live closer to the airport and will have to deal with increased noise from the proposed F-35. I can only imagine the noise when one of these advanced fighters engages its engines and afterburners to move 15 tons of metal from a standstill to take-off speed.

However, just as we cannot reasonably pull the F-16s out of the airport and maintain the same security in our skies, we cannot fail to innovate. The F-35 is the latest innovation, and the Vermont Air Guard is right to feel honored to be one of only a handful of bases where the F-35 is being considered for deployment over the next half-decade.

That honor is probably little consolation to the airport's neighbors, just as it is little consolation that some tests done so far show the F-35 is only slightly louder than the F-16. Tell that to a child woken by afterburners roaring for night missions.

However, our service men and women need to be using the latest equipment possible, in order to help secure our freedom and safety. This is less a liberal or conservative issue than it is a community one.

My suggestion is that we, as a community, work with the Guard to be sure that when Vermont is chosen as a site, we can make the situation the best possible, rather than work against even bringing the new planes here.