nuclear power

I've been hearing for some years now about unreasonable environmental activists fighting against resurrecting the use of DDT in Africa to control the malaria scourge, and meaning to check out the story. Michael Crichton, for example, charged that the ban on DDT has killed more people than Hitler. Hard to ignore.

My interest was further piqued when I met malaria sufferers on my trip to Africa, and again when I donated money to a campaign to buy pesticide-treated mosquito netting for African children. Something like 1 million people die annually from malaria -- most of them African children under age 5.

So, what's the real deal? Are the greens so caught up in their rhetoric they would allow kids to die? I'm afraid getting to the bottom of that question slipped pretty far down my priority list.

Fortunately for me and the rest of the world, Simon Fraser University media prof Donald Gutstein did a pretty thorough job poking into the controversy.

Despite President Barack Obama's push to include nuclear power as part of the mix for developing new energy sources,  some in Utah are saying: Not so fast. Last June, then Governor-in-waiting Gary Herbert, said he wanted to see more investment in nuclear power, and one proposed site for a new plant, which would be Utah's first, is along the Green River in Emery County, reports Patty Henetz of the Salt Lake Tribune. In mid-August, Republican Sen. Bob Bennett made nuclear energy -his support for it - a central campaign issue.

But Utah has a long and complicated history with nuclear issues. The Salt Lake Tribune's editorial board writes this:

 "Despite some positive attributes, nuclear power is not the answer to climate change concerns and our nation's growing energy appetite. And it's certainly not the energy solution for Utah, where downwinders were poisoned by the fallout from years of nuclear weapons testing, where the landscape is scarred by uranium mining and underlain by faults, and where low-level nuclear waste is already buried. Utahns have a healthy fear of all things radioactive, and nuclear reactors would be no exception."

 Nuclear may or may not be the answer to the U.S. energy dilemma, but no one can ignore history while planning for the future.

 Is nuclear power the answer to global warming? Sen. Mark Udall, a Colorado Democrat, seemed to be a reluctant convert to that notion as he accompanied Sen. John McCain on a somber tour of a pine beetle-infested forest in Rocky Mountain National Park in Colorado.

After the tour, Udall and McCain, an Arizona Republican and 2008 Republican presidential candidate who has long supported nuclear power, held a Senate hearing taking testimony detailing the changes scientists are seeing in the park and in other national parks because of global warming and pine beetle infestation, the Denver Post reported.

"I agree with Sen. McCain that nuclear power has to be part of the mix," Udall, chairman of the Energy and Natural Resources Committee's subcommittee on National Parks, said Monday in the meadow. "It is clear that if we want to respond to climate change, nuclear power has to be part of the solution."