A peaceful protest, and kind disagreement

A lot of people came to Sayre Park on Saturday. There were hundreds of folks across Grand Avenue from me where my two signs were the lonely conservative opinions amongst a forest of southpaw sentiment.

Yet the party of joy and inclusion was heartwarmingly kind to me. I’ve never ever had so many people beating their chests while signaling I was No. 1 in their hearts. It was very gratifying.

After my arms tired of sign waving, I walked back to my Jeep wondering how so many people could be so unhappy about so many things while living in our little niche of paradise.

I was also thankful that I lived in a community where people can peacefully disagree, unlike so many violent protests nationally.

Good job, folks, and know that each of you are No. 1 in my heart also.

Bruno Kirchenwitz, Rifle

Thanks for rejecting Spring Valley Ranch plan

Many thanks to the Garfield County Planning Department for clearly stating that the Spring Valley Ranch PUD amendment proposal does not meet county regulations, sending this private resort plan back to the drawing board. We can hope it departs this area and finds a more suitable location.

Storied Development, a multibillion-dollar Georgia-based hedge fund, is proposing an exclusive 6,000-acre recreation ranch resort on prominent hillsides above Lookout Mountain, within four miles of Glenwood Springs. Their plan will create lots for over 500 monstrous second homes, along with two private golf courses, a south-facing ski resort dependent on snowmaking, a commercial center, and a vast list of other resort facilities. It conflicts with numerous county standards and comprehensive plan policies. It is incompatible with the rural character of the area and threatens to dry up neighbors’ wells by wasting about a million gallons of ground water per day. It will also displace wildlife and destroy critical habitat; create safety concerns on Highway 82 and three county roads; destroy the scenic quality of hillsides and ridges; and create indiscriminate noise, light, air, land, and water pollution in the Roaring Fork Valley … and the list of negative impacts goes on.

But this battle is not over yet. This developer still holds an option to purchase the ranch and has promised to keep chipping away at the county rules. We must anticipate that a proposal will be back soon, threatening to create an unsustainable development that will decimate this unique valley.

Stay tuned to help Save Spring Valley from this outrageous attack on your community’s character and livelihood. It may be coming to a meeting near you soon.

Brian Lorch, Glenwood Springs

Clean nuclear is a contradiction

Clean nuclear is a contradiction in terms. There is nothing clean about nuclear energy. Every part of the process is potentially deadly.

Mining uranium involves stockpiling mounds of radioactive dirt that turn into poisonous dust for the downwinders. In the National Library of Medicine, an article titled “Health Effects of Particulate Uranium Exposure,” the first sentence begins with, “Uranium contamination has become a non-negligible global health problem,” and “can cause severe body damage once inhaled.” That’s just scratching around on the ground looking for it, and when it is found, in desert environs, the dust billows over nearby reservations or populations.

The yellowcake is then shipped to concentrating sites, where once again the dust often gets away from us at 0.10% or 1,000 ppm when the uranium ore concentrate is packed into steel drums and hauled to the processing plants to turn it into fuel. Uranium, like other heavy metals, is toxic and should not be inhaled or ingested. Even if mildly radioactive.

My trip to Naturita, Colo., near where it is mined, showed me how the potent radioactive qualities work to rust the bridges, spall the concrete, and ruin folks’ teeth in that beautiful area. The milling and roasting into yellowcake, at Tonawanda, followed by orange oxide at Oak Ridge to uranium tetrachloride, green salt, to S-50 liquid thermal diffusion in the St. Louis plant, then into plutonium piles in Beverly, Massachusetts, or Bloomfield, New Jersey, or Ames, Iowa where the metal is recast in induction-heated furnaces. Each spews dust, vapor, and free electrons along the way to the fuel and target fabrication areas.

Now it can be shipped to one of the 94 reactors in the United States, where it creates electron-saturated cooling water in a closed loop while running turbines. Meanwhile, the water and the nuclear piles pile up year after year and need to be kept from contaminating the environment. The spent pile remains blistering hot for tens of thousands of years, encased in concrete and stainless steel and more concrete, which is stacked on site until it is hauled somewhere for long-term storage, which is where the whole shebang drops its cloak of safety.

Because there is no place to store it safely. Not the deep salt caverns of WIPP or the deep subjunctive zones of the oceans, and wherever they are stacked, it becomes the best place for an enemy to drop a conventional bomb that can do maximum damage to a population that is not directly downwind from their population. This is Ukraine’s saving grace, but not the Southwest U.S.’s.

Chernobyl demonstrated that there is no place on Earth that is not directly downwind, as the atmosphere homogenizes all pollutants within three days. So maybe we don’t want to encourage the proliferation of nuclear plants by calling it clean energy. Ya think?

John Hoffmann, Carbondale