Hello Providence Eye,
Francis Anderson is living in a fantasy world, and promoting a dangerous vision of nuclear power that doesn’t and must not exist.
First off, these so-called ‘next-gen’ reactors ‘smaller than a city block’ don’t actually exist. Various companies are vying for the money that Mr. Trump wants to shell out, but none of these little reactors have actually been built yet and shown to function.
And ‘nuclear power projects are safer and cleaner than virtually any other industrial development’ — please! Try selling this to people who lived near Three Mile Island, Fukushima, Chernobyl, and Brown’s Ferry. These nuclear reactors, when they melt down, can spread
radioactive poison that is both deadly and contaminates land for generations. Not so great for little Rhode Island. And the spent fuel from these reactors will have to be stored, somehow, away from the environment and human activity for longer into the future than any human civilization has yet existed.
And again, Anderson imagines ‘manufacturing these units for export’ to countries around the world. Oops, doesn’t he realize that any fission reaction produces plutonium, the key ingredient in nuclear weapons?
Right now Mr. Trump has sent US Armed Forces to bomb Iran, in the farfetched hope that Iran will give up its program to make nuclear weapons. Maybe it would have been smarter to negotiate a ‘deal’ like Mr. Obama did? But if Rhode Island begins exporting reactors to places overseas, we would be complicit in spreading the ability to make nuclear weapons even more widely than it is today. That would not be very good for little RI’s national security, since a clandestine nuclear weapon could easily be loaded into a container coming in to Quonset or Providence.
There’s one more thing that’s weird about Francis Anderson’s article. He’s all upset about the price of oil and other fossil fuels. But he completely ignores the fastest growing and least expensive alternatives to fossil fuel — renewable energies (wind, solar, and the new gigawatt-size batteries that make renewable energy into baseline day-and-night power). Not only are solar and wind-generated electricity cheaper than both oil and nuclear, their economic
advantage is that they can be installed very quickly without tying up capital for years during construction. And once we learn to build floating turbines (catching up with Korea and China) we will be able to harness the strong, steady winds out to the 200-mile limit where
we’ve claimed fishing rights — and that will make New England a net energy exporter.
So let’s not believe everything that nuclear proponents like Mr. Anderson try to sell us.
Yours,
William W. Smith III
Jamestown, RI
I recently wrote an opinion piece for Providence Eye’s Readers Voices on the Cesar Chavez statue in Davis Park, “Should Cesar Chavez Be Exiled from Davis Park? I Say ‘Yes’.” I was not able to insert a quote from Providence City Councilor Miguel Sanchez before the article was posted.
For the record, here are comments received in a telephone conversation with Councilor Sanchez:
“I am very disappointed to hear about the horrific abuses that Cesar committed…I have been getting many calls from people that the statue should come down immediately and calls from people that there should be a process that takes place before the statue is removed…the work that was done by the United Farm Workers to stop the injustices that the migrant workers suffered should not be thrown out with the statue…I understand that there is some type of committee that the Mayor has that deals with public commemorations that will be called on to hear what the public should happen. I would support that type of process and would want the Councilor for the Davis Park area, Althea Graves, to be involved in the decision making.”
Bob McMahon
Elmhurst
Dear Providence Eye,
I was very interested in the letter about open primaries. [Ranked-Choice Voting Would Improve Democracy in Providence – and Across Rhode Island.]
Because of my religious convictions, I do not participate in any partisan politics, and I do not vote in primaries, which require me to identify/affiliate with a political party. I DO vote in the general election, which does not require party designation for voting, but by then the dye is often already cast. The current system, dominated by one party (at least in Providence), therefore excludes my vote from being cast in any meaningful way. The open primary, in which all voters can participate without affiliating with a political party (combined with ranked choice voting) would give all of us a more equal voice.
Warmest regards,
Paul G. Smith
East Side
[In response to Readers’ Voices piece “It’s Time for Providence – and Rhode Island – to Go Nuclear.“]
To the Editor, the Nuclear Power industry has been saying for more than 30 years that the next generation of nuclear power will be clean, safe and cheap. They are still saying it but there is no evidence that it can be done. As for providing all of our electricity by 2050, there is little evidence that any of the nukes will be ready for market in less than 10 years, so instead of waiting for an unproven technology, let us move swiftly with proven technologies, solar and wind, and stop the fantasy that nuclear is anything other than a cover for the nuclear weapons industry. We know how to eliminate fossil fuels. Let us go solar and go wind, and quit messing around with highly dangerous substances.
[In response to “Providence’s Largest Primary Care Provider Searches for New Leadership. What’s Next for Patients?“]To the Editor, while many of the articles we all say about the healthcare crisis focus on reimbursement rates, none of them focus on the fact that healthcare in the US costs way more than it does in other countries, while at the same time we have lower life
expectancies. Clearly it is not only the reimbursement system that is off kilter but that we deliver lousy care and prices that are way too high. What we have to do is reduce the cost of healthcare. This means more primary care, but in addition we have to clean up pollution
as so much of the disease burden people in the US face is due to toxic chemicals and other pollutants in the environment. The primary examples are air pollution and asthma and all of the cancers younger people are coming down with. Until we actually practice prevention by
cleaning up the environment, we will continue to have a healthcare crisis, both in terms of sicker people and higher costs.
Greg Gerritt
East Side
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