Catrina Rorke, R Street: With the recently announced planned retirements of nuclear facilities in Illinois and California, nearly 10 percent of the U.S. nuclear-energy fleet either already has closed or is scheduled to close within the next 16 years. Worse, there are no plans to replace them or add new plants. Similar in Germany and soon also in Switzerland. France wisely planned to replace their nuclear power plants. Russia and China are going ahead with nuclear power for the long term future.
Pat Boone, Tom Tamarkin: This letter to Pope Francis is about Anthropogenic Global Warming and our energy choices: wind, solar, fossil fuels, and nuclear with focus on nuclear fusion. Tragically the AGW concept has created corrupt conditions. This represents the worst side of economic imperialism: monies being taken from the people and redistributed to governments, institutions and corporations based on politics as opposed to science and solid economics.
Eric Jelinski, Mechanical Engineer, President of Environmentalists for Nuclear - Canada: Interest in producing synthetic fuels to operate engines has been around since the 1930s. Today, there is interest to produce hydrogen based synthetic fuels and "carbon neutral" fuels. This article presents a down to earth technology and economics review of what is practical at the present.
Gary Young, retired engineering manager: It is lamented that far too few of the electorate have any real understanding of the hard sciences. This lack of understanding has given rise to embracing poor (junk) science at even some of the highest levels of academic and political thought. The current concept of most concern is all the political rhetoric about renewables such as solar and wind providing our energy. There is only one well understood technology at the present time that could produce vast amounts of power in addition to fossil fuels and that is nuclear. We are held back from the nuclear solution by unfounded fear. The root of the fear is the very wrong doctrine of “liner no threshold” concerning the biological effects of radiation. In truth, there are thresholds and almost nothing in science is linear.