Bernard Klainberg's original article and R/Adm. Paul Early's answer seem to have generated an ongoing controversy which I cannot let pass without my comments.

Adm. Early's statement, "Nuclear power plant operation requires a very high standard of care and training because the risks are recognized as significant," can be said of a great many industrial and/or transportation jobs. However, this particular problem is even more amenable to being solved than many of the other jobs, and the record is extremely excellent. The Chernobyl reactor was a carbon pile one and there are none operating in the United States and there have not been any for many years. I believe that in the United States we only had two: The original test pile that was under a stadium in Chicago back during WWII and another in the Pacific northwest that made fuel for atomic bombs. Neither has operated in many years. The type of reactor that we use in the United States cannot catch fire as they contain nothing to burn. The accident at Three Mile Island injured no one. A minimal amount of radioactivity did escape, but not enough to harm anyone. Safety procedures put in place and strictly enforced since that time have assured that this will never happen again. What radioactive discharges have occurred over the years have been so minimal that they never constituted a danger to the general public.

There are literally dozens of nuclear power plants that have operated for many years in western Europe and I have never heard of any accident at any of them.

The $5 billion debt from Shoreham was the total cost of construction and destruction of the plant. The cost of construction was about $3-1/2 billion dollars. The cost of its destruction was about $1-1/2 billion dollars. A large part of the construction costs was due to lax management, continual changes in specification and interest on the debt. Part of the problem was politically inspired and/or due to falsehoods being told as though they were true. Why did the authorities insist that the diesel-powered generators be tested at a power beyond that power for which they were designed? Who cut the wires that powered some of the emergency sirens? Who caused a panic among some people by continually saying, "Long Island cannot be evacuated," when only a small area might possibly have to be evacuated? Who said that we did not and would not need the power generated by Shoreham? (The very same person who now says that we will need more power in the very near future, even after adding power availability since that time.)

Mr. Klainberg suggests solar panels. At the present time they are entirely too costly and besides that we do not have the necessary bright sunshine here to make them practical. He also suggests using wind power. This could only be done on the eastern end of the island and even then we do not have the steady and consistent winds that are needed. His other suggestions are possible, but not until a very long time into the future.

His remarks about us depositing our nuclear waste in some starving third world country are absolutely uncalled for.

Mr. Klainberg's remarks about the cost of distribution of electricity are a mystery to me. Just how do you get the power from the place of generation to its users without a distribution network?

Eugene W. Garges Jr.