1) "I was wondering where you got the information that recycling paper costs more than producing new paper and saves new trees."
M.G., Riverside, Calif.
Trees: Paper consumes trees grown (farmed) for that purpose. Cost: ask your local paper wholesaler about the price of 1,000 sheets (same size, same weight same finish, of course, e.g., this sheet is 11 by 17, 20lb bond, smooth). Yet newsprint makers are investing almost entirely in plants removing ink from used paper, not in mills. See also following letter.
2) "My children asked me, 'Dad, why recycle paper, cans and plastic?
.... I held out my gold wedding ring and asked 'Do we need a program by the government to stop me from throwing gold and diamonds in the land fill?... Maybe everyone will throw their jewelry away unless the government makes us recycle them!" They are 12 and 9 years old, and they got the point.
M.M., Mt. Prospect, Ill.
3) "I know you accept only one year's subscription, but with the Colorado boycott, I couldn't resist prepaying another year..."
W.E. W, Palo Alto, Calif.
Your subscription came up for renewal with this issue, anyway, so I accepted your check, thank you. Colorado's Amendment Two is a civil rights law, if there ever was one: it forbids granting privileges to special groups such as homosexuals. As for the boycott, I support it: let the idiots who believe otherwise without having read the amendment spend their holidays in the South Bronx or in Bowie, Texas; it will decongest the roads here and give the tourist industry a year off from hard work (such as selling gasoline at double the regular price in the mountains).
4) No, it was not economics but the government that forced the unjustified shutdown of San Onofre, Calif., and of Trojan, Ore. (on the heels of the voter's refusal to have it shut down). A government gadget caged Integrated Resource Planning, presumably bought for dollars from the Soviet Central Planning Office, essentially allows the government to decree which plants shall run and which shall be shut down because its economics do not meet "standards" set by the planners, for example, by taking a guess at the price of gas in 2,013. Facing large capital expenditures ($125 million at San Onofre and $200 million for new steam generators), the utilities had to submit to the Supreme Soviet. Incidentally, most utility executives are obsequious wimps catering to Green myths rather than to the shareholders, but there are exceptions; see, e.g., Allegheny Power System's report to its stockholders, May 1992.
5) Fuel shares of 1992 net electricity generation: coal 56.1%; nuclear 21.8%, hydro 9.3%, gas 9.0%, oil 3.4%, sunshine, windmills, chicken dropping, etc., etc.,0.4%.
6) Revised fractions of radiation dose delivered to the average citizen: natural background 81% (= 54% radon + 8% cosmic radiation + 8% terrestrial sources + 11% internal body dose); nuclear medicine 15% (= 11% medical diagnostics + 4% other nuclear medicine); consumer products 3%; other 1% (of which nuclear power is 0.1%).
7) Subscriber Thomas Lowinger succeeded in having a commendable letter on reactor-grade plutonium and the Japanese ship published in the New York Times (1/3/93) and received an answer from the NYTs chief of its Tokyo bureau with statements so outrageously incompetent (the North Koreans are working on separating Pu 239 from the rest of the physical mixture, haha) that it cannot even be judged a deliberate lie.
8) "Would you give us your opinion of the new Secretary of Energy?"
R.J.G., Burbank, Calif.
Beyond the many press reports, Hazel O'Leary was elected President of Northern States Power on 12/16/92 (date of news release), when the Board must already have known she was picked for Secretary. But as VP on 3/31/92 she urged the Senate Energy Committee to "aggressively move forward on the waste storage program" at Yucca Mountain, Nev. That will put her at loggerheads with imminent top EP Acrat Carol Browner, who has never worked in the private sector, came to Fat City, D.C., to work for Nader's Citizen Action and later to become Gaga Gore's top legislative aid, collecting material for his insane book Earth in the Balance. Anyone at loggerheads with that type of creature can't be all bad, but with a boss like hers I reserve judgment.
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Vol. 20, No. 6
Newsletter: Access to Energy Newsletter Archive Volume: Volume 20 Issue/No.: Vol. 20, No. 6 Date: February 01, 1993 11:08 AM Title: The Ascendance of the Lie
Copyright © 2004 - Access to Energy Newsletter Archive
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