The Green Hew Deal--Green for Whom?

• Position: EYE ON ECOLOGY

Let's be clear: inefficient, environment-damaging, land-consuming solar farms are displacing native species and blighting hundreds of square miles of former forest, desert, and prairie. It is all about money, and the planet, our home, is coming in last.

During the search for alternatives to coal, which was guided by an anything-but-nuclear bias, science-deficient, money-centered legislators, carbon companies, and anti-nuclear "green" organizations like the Sierra Club, which accepts money from Chesapeake Energy, sought to exclude nuclear power--the greenest, most-efficient way to make electricity--from consideration because it was not "renewable," even though we have enough uranium and thorium to last 100,000 years.

Yes, we need electricity, but we also must consider its source. We should electrify our transportation industry and supply that electricity by replacing every carbon-burning furnace at every power plant with highly efficient, C[O.sub.2]-free, environment-benign, modem nuclear reactors that cannot melt down; can convert 90% of our stored nuclear "waste" into electricity; and, according to the United Nations and the World Health Organization, are the safest way to generate electricity.

Because the carbon industries know that 92% "efficient" nuclear power will cripple them, BP, Exxon, and associates promote inefficient solar and wind farms that only generate about 20% and 33%, respectively, of their rated capacity, relying on power plants that primarily bum carbon--much of it natural gas supplied by aquifer-polluting tracking--to generate the remainder of their capacity. For carbon companies, profits come first, though they try to appear "green," as when BP added yellow and green flowers to its TV ads after its disastrous 800-mile "spill" damaged the Gulf of Mexico during the Obama Administration.

Nuclear power is 115 times safer than wind and 340 times safer than solar per unit of electricity generated, and those figures include Russia's Chernobyl plant, a civilian/military facility that was adaptable for making plutonium for bombs.

Chernobyl, which had been judged unsafe by the Western nuclear industry, eventually failed when, on orders from Moscow, the operators foolishly ran a test with the safety systems disabled. Despite hysterical predictions of millions of deaths, the UN reports a death toll of fewer than 70 to date.

Building a wind farm requires 11 times more resources than a nuclear plant of the same capacity (solar needs...