Re “Japan’s Multiple Calamities” (editorial, March 15):  What kind of a shock would it take to jolt Americans into facing the fact that we are living beyond our environmental means? How about multiple meltdowns of plutonium-fueled reactors spewing death far and wide? Not even that, apparently.  Our politicians are telling us not to make any rash decisions about the viability of a nuclear future. After all, renewable sources, though safe, have only a comparatively puny output of power.  Could we ourselves actually be the problem?  Houses that used to get along just fine on 60 amps of power have become obese and now need 400 amps to feed our “essential” luxuries. And we appear to be completely impotent to rein in a world population growth that is now about seven billion souls, each of whom will “need” more power.  None of the small stuff will matter if we do not address these larger questions. Carl Mezoff Stamford, Conn., March 15, 2011  The writer is an architect.  I welcome your comment that while you think nuclear power remains a valuable tool, “the public needs to know that it is a safe one.”  Reading and watching the horrifying news coming out of Japan, I have wondered whether my fellow Americans might better understand why we Nevadans have been so leery of and often angry at the proposal to locate the nation’s first high-level nuclear waste repository at Yucca Mountain in our state.  Your newspaper has supported consideration of Yucca as a waste site and belittled our questions about its safety. Perhaps now you will rethink that.  Just as many Japanese have memories of the destruction at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, some Nevadans recall being told that the mushroom clouds floating above the desert after aboveground atomic tests in the 1950s and 1960s were no threat at all; death and disease resulted from believing those claims.  Michael Green Las Vegas, March 15, 2011  The writer is a professor of history at the College of Southern Nevada.  In a poignantly tragic twist of history, an accidental toxic catastrophe involving the peaceful use of nuclear energy is visited upon the only nation to have ever borne the brunt of intentionally inflicted nuclear explosions used as weapons of war.  Lest the Japanese reactor crisis serve to undermine the acceptance of expanding the use of nuclear power in our nation, consider the staggering costs in health, quality of life and loss of life experienced in the pursuit of fossil fuels.  These include coal miners who suffer or succumb to the effects of their exposure or who are trapped in their mines; wildlife and workers along America’s Gulf Coast; and soldiers and civilians whose lives are cut short or forever damaged by conflict in the Middle East.  Without some proper perspective in our national discourse on energy policy, the strident rhetoric of those who would have us eternally reliant upon fossil fuels might drown out the more judicious voices. Lester R. Schwartz Weatogue, Conn., March 15, 2011  The recent argument for nuclear power has been that it is the only large-scale energy source that is economically competitive with fossil fuels and that won’t contribute to global warming. But as the horrible disaster in Japan is making clear, nuclear energy comes with many hidden costs.  These are already manifest in the government insurance that is necessary to raise capital to build reactors and in the government responsibility for nuclear waste disposal. Add to this the government responsibility for the costs of disaster management and recovery and for decommissioning ruined reactors, not to mention whatever dollar amount you want to assign to the lives lost or ruined in disasters, and the real costs soar.  Fossil fuels also have the hidden costs of climate change, which will likely dwarf those of nuclear power, as well as the costs of oil spills and other disasters and myriad government subsidies.  If all of these hidden costs were factored in, we might find that renewables are by far the cheapest source of energy. Kenneth Miller New York, March 15, 2011
Readers respond to articles about the Japanese tragedy and the need for better methods to cope with disasters.