While political candidates stump the country talking of peace, the administration keeps moving on with its plan to build more aggressive weapons, nuclear bombs. They admit that thousands of them are already stashed away but the Department of Energy tells us we need more, and we need to build a better process to get them.

The site they will probably choose is the Savannah River Site near Augusta on the Savannah River. Don't worry about the falling water level, don't worry about the radioactive tritium already in the river from the old processing; just modernize.

Feb. 21 was the date of the public hearing in Augusta and many of us trekked there to offer our comments. Actually 54 spoke, even nervous high school students and 80-somethings like me, retirees and professionals. All 54 spoke against the proposal, citing reasons from draining the aquifer that feeds 5 southeastern states to the havoc wrought by our two atomic bombs on Japan in 1945, to the danger from carrying radioactive waste across the country from the Oak Ridge bomb plant and the Hanford plant in Washington. So the score was 54-0 in the afternoon and 8-4 in the evening.

Colorful posters and cartoons cheered us but the mood was serious. The cost of this project would be huge, from the humongous construction cost to the use of water. Any nuclear process needs to be cooled but we are still in a drought. Now there is a proposal to take 13 percent of the water reserve in the aquifer to cool the Vogtle nuclear plant.

We may soon have to choose between drinking water, irrigating farms, cooling nuclear plants or building more nuclear bombs. You can make your choice by e-mailing complextransformation@nnsa.doe.gov; faxing 703-931-9222; or writing to Ted Wyka, NNSA, Office of Transformation NA-10.1, US Dept. of Energy, 1000 Independence Ave. SW, Washington, DC 20585. The deadline for people to respond is April 10.

Adele Kushner
Alto

State's water grab is part of abusive pattern
Why is it that Gov. Sonny Perdue refuses to act in an intelligent and responsible manner regarding the boundaries of the essential natural resource base?

Conversely, in arid areas, people act more frugally and treat water with more respect. Urban Atlanta inhabitants, under Shirley Franklin, Perdue and their corporate attorneys, do neither, and they apparently refuse to adjust to the natural and common law.

Tennessee can rely upon the TVA agreement, and that water is already allocated. Perdue and his corporate attorneys have already lost the water grab controversy and are having to adjust to the idea that there were others who have rights to and interests in some of that limited and limiting resource. They will have to change their wanton, wasteful and abusive pattern of behavior. That is obviously the real and continuing problem that they still refuse to acknowledge and address.

Fortunately there are others who have the common and moral sense and the fortitude to restrain that urban collective and its mindless wanton behavior.

Teresa Stansel
Cleveland