Nuclear Plants

In her column describing our nuclear overruns (“Our Costly Nuclear Follies, From Seabrook to San Luis Obispo,” Opinion, March 25), Prof. Donella Meadows correctly cites many reasons for overruns on the order of one magnitude for nuclear power plants. She concludes that to tell the truth prior to a go-ahead decision of any such project will help to preclude many problems, delays and cost overruns.

I submit that with the current management mentality of the attorneys and accountants who apparently run much of the nuclear power industry, they do not even know what questions to ask in order to get to the truth. Our whole industrial complex seems to have been taken over by a management approach that reduces everything to a level of quarterly profit and rewards managers for getting an extremely complex system “on-line” by a certain date to increase profits. Unfortunately, the government regulators have all been taken in to believing that this approach works and we wind up with the current chaos in nuclear power.

BOB YERBER

Oceanside