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Unfair Fair on the Square
It was very disappointing when my family and I arrived at this past Thursday’s [April 15] Sundown in the City. First, we were stopped and told we could not come in and sit in our chairs and enjoy the concert. Sorry, no chairs allowed. Now this was a shock, since we enjoy coming and sitting for hours listening to the music and enjoying the festivities of the Market Square concert series.
Somehow I don’t find it an encouraging and enjoyable experience, after working and standing on my feet all day and rushing to meet family so we can enjoy a relaxing evening together listening to the concert, then�to be told that I have to stand all evening if I want to listen. So, I have to walk two more blocks to the parking lot, which had also raised its price from $3 the previous week to $5, to return our chairs to our car. Then back to the square to find my family and also to find that the square was now a tent city of vendors selling everything from apples and tee shirts to toe rings and funnel cakes. A regular county fair.
Oh, and on my pleasant walk to my car to return the chairs, I heard many people grumbling about the no-chair rule. Many were from surrounding areas such as Dandridge and Jefferson City who had heard about the great concert the week before and had come to enjoy themselves with their families. But what I heard was not “Wow, this is fun,” but it was more of “This is ridiculous” and “This is our last time coming to Knoxville for stuff like this.”
Well, if this was not bad enough, when I finally found my family and got to the front where the stage area was, there was not much room to stand to see, since the tent city now took up most of the square’s area in front of the stage. Then I noticed that there were, in fact, several people in chairs at the front. Most of them were older people who had evidentially gotten to the area before event staff was there to prevent their entry with their chairs. Then, suddenly the staff went into action ordering the old people to leave and remove their chairs. But what finally broke the camel’s back with me and my family was the fact that there was a man who had recently had knee surgery sitting in a chair and he was ordered to remove it, so this man with his cane hobbled with his chair and left.
That did it for us; we were not going to eat and spend our money at a place that did not appreciate the people who had come to show support for their city and the culture here. I heard on the news how Sundown was another big success with almost 5,000 people attending. Well, that is a far number short of the over 10,000 the week before. And I know many people who were not attending, because they left with their chairs.
Somehow I feel this is not the way to bring success to an ongoing weekly event. I do understand that the Dogwood Arts Festival was starting this week, but that is no excuse to allow a free family event to become a den of thieves looking to drain every dime possible out of a leg-weary crowd.
I think, for one, the officials in charge owe the city an apology, and they need to take a hard look at what they want to achieve. I know that, until we hear different, we will not be going to concerts where we have to stand the whole night. �
Jim�Roberts
Knoxville
Anti-Nuclear Flaws
When you publish an article like “Nuclear Freeze” [April 22] in a publication within a flung tomato’s range of the Oak Ridge plants and the UT Nuclear Engineering Department, I’m sure you’ll get a vigorous response. Including mine. My main problem concerns the author’s sources of “information-”—mainly from the anti-nuclear establishment. Bill Baxter and Thelma Wiggins are the only pro-nuclear sources consulted at all. The most frequently quoted source is Stephen Smith, an anti-nuclear zealot with no engineering training, experience, or knowledge. Here are some of his beliefs to which you give space:
1.) “[Nuclear power] is unforgiving. If you make a mistake, it’s enormous.”
Not true. In around 40 years of commercial nuclear power there have been no U.S. nuclear accidents harming the public or plant personnel. How many major industries have a record like that? At Three Mile Island, the staff made two outrageous mistakes, destroying the plant with no human consequences.
2.) “Operative and maintenance [cost] at any given moment can be low. But it doesn’t factor in the capital costs to build the plant. It doesn’t factor in the decommission costs or the subsidies.”
Worse and worse! Of course the price of nuclear power includes the capital costs! Interest on the construction loans is the biggest expense the plants have! Sinking funds for decommission are required. And there aren’t any subsidies. Quite the contrary—the plants are taxed to provide for spent fuel disposal, something the Government has yet to provide.
3.) “Nuclear waste stays dangerous for an incredibly long time—240,000 years.”
This is preposterous! The major radioactive hazards will be gone in 600-700 years. Buried a mile down, it should stay out of trouble for that long. Where does Smith get his ridiculous number? It has to be the plutonium. Pu 139 has a half-life of 24,400 years. It will decay by a factor of 1024 in 10 half-lives, or about 240,000 years. That’s where he gets it.
As its huge half-life indicates, Pu 139 is not radioactive enough to worry about. It is indeed poisonous, 10 times as poisonous as nicotine, one-tenth as poisonous as arsenic. You don’t want to eat it, but there’s a lot worse stuff than that out there, far less isolated. There’s one other little issue. If nuclear waste were reprocessed, and the plutonium extracted and burned in power reactors to provide electricity for air-conditioning orphanages and transmitting educational TV programs, well, in the neutron flux of a power reactor Pu 139 has a half-life of three or four months. Of course that raises the specter of potential bomb material. Maybe some day.
4.) “If we had no other options maybe we should have a serious conversation about nuclear power. But we have other options...”
No, we don’t. Coal and nuclear are the only alternatives with the capacity to do the job. Windmills are expensive, take hundreds of square miles of windmill farms to equal one big nuclear plant, and only work when the wind blows. Solar arrays have the same or equivalent problems. Baby chicks on treadmills are a cruel and exploitive source, only marginally more practical than the other renewable resources.
The subject of your article is worth discussion and debate. Why did you neglect the huge reservoir of nuclear expertise in the Knoxville/Oak Ridge area, and then give a public forum for the likes of Stephen Smith and Ralph Nader’s Public Citizen?
Robert S. Stone
Oak Ridge
April 29, 2004 • Vol. 14, No. 18
© 2004 Metro Pulse
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