The mail.(Letter to the Editor)

I enjoyed reading William Tucker's "The Solution" (January/February). Nuclear power plants are safer, cost less to operate, have zero emissions, and occupy much, much less space than an emissions-belching, coal-fired power plant. However, the environmental extremists have so poisoned public opinion concerning nuclear power plants that my neighboring city of San Antonio is planning to build a billion-dollar coal power plant, despite its safety and emissions problems. It would be refreshing if such decisions were made on a careful analysis of the best available technology, rather than on the emotionalism of environmentalists who only look backwards.

John McCulloch

Austin, Texas

Amory Lovins defends his hydrogen fuel proposals on our Web site, along with a response from William Tucker. See www.TAEmag.com/Lovins.

Suburbanization may be inevitable, as Joel Kotkin argues persuasively in "Suburbia Forever" (January/February), but its modern form, which comes with a weak sense of community, is not.

States and the federal government have been steadily eroding the autonomy of communities for a century. Phase 1 in their assault is central control of education--teacher licensing and training, curricula, testing, and textbook adoption. Phase 2 is school district consolidation. There were roughly 127,000 school districts in 1930, there are just over 14,000 today, with huge, centralized high schools located, likely as not, in some distant cornfield. Phase 3 is diversity engineering. Federal courts ordered or influenced race-based school assignments in hundreds of school districts, hastening middle class flight to suburbia and wiping out thousands of neighborhoods.

This multi-pronged assault has left little "community" in suburbia today. The local high school--once the center of community life--is gone. This did not have to be. Our leaders could choose to abandon the impulse to coerce and imagine a role for freedom and autonomy in our neighborhoods.