ENERGY
Utilities care about cash, not about customers
Georgia Power plans to close two coal-fueled power burners because it will cost money to make them environmentally clean. Is that more than a nuclear reactor producing the equivalent of 1,000 nuclear bombs?
The utility is a corporation in business to make money (not to care about the health or safety of its customers). If it cared, we would have solar panels, solar cells, wind turbines, efficient windows and insulation factored into our bills.
Where are our legislators? Who planned the deal that railroaded the construction of these deadly plants? We need to demolish the two existing Georgia Power burners, stop construction on the new reactors, and truly move toward clean energy. The sun is our natural reactor. Nuclear power is the dirtiest form of energy on this planet.
Kathy Panzella, Powder Springs
ENERGY
Schools should consider a four-day week
With diesel fuel and gasoline costs off the charts, it’s time for metro-area school systems to give very serious consideration to a four-day, 10-hours-per-day school week.
The savings in transportation, utilities and food would far outweigh any parental “inconvenience.”
Local school systems must realize the revenue for public education is going to continue to evaporate. Drastic times call for drastic measures.
Barry Pack, Dallas
HOPE
Surge in tuition costs highly questionable
I have been following closely the changes coming for the HOPE scholarship. News coverage states there was a 16 percent increase in tuition costs over the past year. I question the justification of such a large increase during a period when inflation had flat-lined and the economy was in a recession. We all want our universities to have the funding to provide for quality professors and equipment to properly educate our students, but when the HOPE scholarship is facing a shortfall in funding and students starting next fall will be expected to pay substantially more for their education, I feel it is time that our universities reeled in their costs and shared in the financial pinch.
W. E. Stavro, Suwanee
TRANSPORTATION
A few creative solutions DOT has yet to pursue
Where is Georgia’s creativity hiding? Certainly not in the Georgia Department of Transportation. The DOT could do metro Atlanta a great service by objectively comparing the fully allocated gross cost and complexity of constructing miles of new toll lanes and linguine junctions, and the unlikelihood of comprehensively “solving” I-75 and I-575 bottlenecks.
The transportation grant sought could much more effectively address the region’s transport ills by funding the extension of MARTA’s green line to Kennesaw, with near-term single track extensions to both Canton and perhaps Carpentersville, while removing impact upon already-overburdened NS and CSX freight rails.
Jan David Jubon, Buford
