What Iowa needs is renewable energy

Warren Buffett's salary last year topped

$62 million. With so much money in his pockets and corporate bank accounts, why is Buffett's own MidAmerican Energy working to build a new radioactive nuclear power plant in Iowa that shifts the costs to rate payers? Iowans get all the upfront costs, into the billions, and all the financial and safety risks. But Buffett's company will pocket any profits. Really? Would Buffett do this deal if it was the other way around?

Even if the plant is never built, development costs will be borne by Iowans and those costs are unknowable. The long term secure storage of radioactive waste costs alone are huge. Radioactive nuclear energy plants are so risky that insurance companies won't insure them and banks won't do loans for them. So Buffett will charge the ‘credit card' of working Iowa families, with huge interest costs.

Iowa PIRG's new study shows that currently available green renewable energy technology could be deployed in the U.S. to deliver massive reductions in global warming pollution, at half the costs with twice the job creation, as an equivalent amount of nuclear and coal-fire power.

The Nuclear Policy Research Institute says the United States can create an economy with zero emissions of global warming carbon dioxide pollution within 30 to

50 years without nuclear power.

We don't need radioactive nuclear power (and Iowans shouldn't have to fork over the money for it). We should invest in what we really want and need: a green renewable sustainable energy future.

Marybeth Gardam

Cedar Rapids