Letter: Small nukes for Arizona are bad

The Arizona Legislature passes many birdbrained bills, but the one promoting small nuclear plants takes the cake. Nukes require huge amounts of water to cool them. Do we have any water to spare? Nukes often pollute the groundwater with deadly radioactivity. The now-closed plant in Vermont leaked radioactive tritium into the ground, polluting the water source for the local elementary school. There is no safe place to put high-level nuclear waste. According to the National Academy of Sciences, such waste is deadly to humans for ONE MILLION years. Yucca Mountain, the place the government once designated for this stuff, is a former volcano. Even assuming it were "safe," how could one possibly warn humans to avoid it for that period of time? Human history goes back only 5,000 years. Languages change; signs wear away. Arizona has an inexhauistible power source: the sun. That's the only rational answer.