Nuke story said too little, too much

Courteney Stuart's clear, brief, and informative article [Tuesday Mar 15, 2011 in issue #1011: "Nuclear nightmare: Could a Japan happen here?"] raises two concerns: one omitted fact that everyone needs reminding of, and one included fact that no one really needs to know.

Specifically, we all need periodic reminders that nuke plants were designed by the military-industrial complex, which President Eisenhower warned us about, to make weapons grade plutonium from refined uranium. The goal was hydrogen bombs, and lots of them.

Nukes never were and never have been a cheap source of electricity, but "cheap and safe" was the message ground into the public's thinking during the years of the cold war. The cold war is over, but the nuke bureaucracy lives on, and so does the momentum of that miss-guided cheap and safe thinking.

The one included fact that no one needs to know, especially folks who mean us harm, was blithely exposed by Elena Day and recorded and published by Stuart in this article: namely, a way to deprive the local nuke plant of the water needed to cool the rods and trigger a meltdown.

Now tell me, is there really a need to print a local's knowledge or an insider's knowledge about a matter as serious as this? I don't think so.

If the goal is to educate readers into de-nuking the US countryside of these terribly expensive and terribly temperamental machines of death, then publish relevant facts like employee training or lack of it, or equipment failures, or whistle blowers who got their jaws broken, etc.

Revealing conditions or events like these might awaken a few readers to the fact that both bombs and nukes are nightmares waiting to happen. And unfortunately, they will continue to happen somewhere unless we say "yes" to earth-friendly leaders and earth-friendly sources of energy.

Clay Moldenhauer
Charlottesville