1999 April 26 To the Editor, The Toronto Star: Re: "Nuclear waste is plentiful" (letter, April 15), Irene Kock warns that nuclear waste is much more voluminous than I describe in my March 24 letter, once you account for historical uranium mine tailings. The intent of my letter was to put the volume of nuclear waste into perspective, by comparing it to the waste from fossil power which has been displaced over the last 37 years. To that end, Ms. Kock is advised to include the mining wastes from fossil power in her comparisons, and include the fact that nuclear power generates, pound for pound, thousands of times more electricity than fossil power. Even overlooking, as Ms. Kock does, the issue of fossil mine wastes, I wonder how many hockey rinks would be filled by a billion tonnes of CO2 gas, or a hundred million tonnes of air pollution? How many thousands of Canadians have died from our combustion of fossil fuels, and how many have died from nuclear power? How many millions of additional lives have been saved around the world, thanks to nuclear medicine? These are the essential questions to ask when disputing the environmental and health legacy of nuclear power in Canada. Ms. Kock also misinforms about the danger of spent nuclear fuel disposal. Canadian scientists have developed a technology that maintains radiation levels above a disposal site at negligible levels forever, even with a breach of the disposal containers after 500 years. Ms. Kock focuses on this assumption of leakage and ignores the rest of the science. This is fear-mongering. Finally, the issue of wind and solar power is raised. Again Ms. Kock neglects to compare apples and apples, since she does not provide an estimate of how many hockey rinks would be filled by the raw materials, and/or their extraction tailings, needed to build a wind or solar plant comparable in output to a nuclear station. For example, to equal the performance of Pickering, which supplies a city the size of Toronto, we would need about 40,000 wind generators covering an area roughly four times the size of PEI. That's a lot of material and maintenance, which cannot be ignored when comparing the impacts of energy technologies. Sincerely, Jeremy Whitlock