On November 3, 2008 the New York Times published a letter by one Paul R Epstein, an Instructor in Medicine at Harwavrd University, in which he does his best to conjure up fear using tainted information to scare the public away from Nuclear Energy.

Well, Mr. Epstein, in the words of the great Samuel L. Jackson – “Please, allow me to retort.”

The three reasons he cites are safety, storage, and security. In the interests of being systematic, I shall dissect these false assumptions one at a time:

1. Safety: Mr. Epstein does not mention one iota of fact or one single statistic on this issue. He simply and briefly calls Nuclear “unsafe” and then moves on. Why, you ask? Could it be because there has not been one single public death in nearly 40 years of operation in the American nuclear industry?

To put that in perspective, according to the United States Consumer Product Safety Commission, one child died in 2004 by means of suffocation under a pile of stuffed animals. Given this data, it can be said that more members of the public are killed annually in the United States by Teddy Bears than Nuclear Energy! Surely Mr. Epstein will now publish a dissertation citing the inherent risks to the public posed by Teddy Ruckspin and the corporate conspiracy surrounding Mr. Ruckspin that the government is covering up.  Right, Paul?

2. Storage: Epstein says, “Ten seismic faults lie within a 20-mile radius of Yucca Mountain.” I’m sorry Mr. Epstein, but earthquakes do not destroy mountains. It is very easy to say earthquake and nuclear waste in the same sentence, but I would like to see some documentation as to what exactly an earthquake would do to a hardened facility underneath a mountain other than a potential cave in. Ok, so it caved in. Now what? It’s still buried isn’t it? So what happened? Nothing.

3. Security: Again he offers no facts to support his claim. He merely calls it “insurmountable.” Now observe as I surmount. Anyone who has been to an American Nuclear Power Plant since 9/11 will tell you that there is no more protected facility on this Earth. Besides that, If you claim terrorism as a reason to deny us this resource than you and the New York Times are guilty of using terrorism to scare the public into submission. This, after all, is the same newspaper that accuses President George W. Bush of doing exactly that. I’ve said it before and I will say it again – terrorism is a terrible excuse to not do something. Besides, there are far easier targets that would produce far more damage and visibility than an attack at a nuclear site.

He goes on throughout his letter to try to use issues like startup cost and the environment to make it seem impossible to make nuclear work. What he does not mention is that nuclear is the cleanest means of generating any significant amount of energy available to us. Also, he forgets to tell you that the Nuclear Industry has operated for decades without government subsidies while wind, solar, and Ethanol have all been given grotesque sums of taxpayer dollars for research and development and are still unable to compete with a self sustaining nuclear industry.

Rest assured ladies and gentlemen, people like Dr. Epstein and Alec Baldwin can ramble on and on using words that scare children and statistics that don’t hold water. However, this Babeler believes that most Americans are smart enough to listen to science instead of fear. One day, America will achieve energy independence and Nuclear Power will be at the center of it.

~Man Overboard