I would like to comment on the Jan. 19 front-page article "" Their warnings are surely in line with what people have been telling us for over 20 years. The nuclear lobby will go on telling us that we need its energy and that, if we shut the reactors down, we will be catapulted back into the stone age. Pork-barrel politics will make sure that we keep running them for another 20 years and that we build new ones.

I am amazed that almost no one appears to be hammering the politicians and the energy lobby on the real issue: What will we do with the nuclear waste once reactors are decommissioned?

The only country — as pointed out in another article recently — that is trying to solve this problem is Finland. The costs are staggering and make nuclear energy by far the most expensive-ever source of energy.

If you pause and think that governments will have to protect us and all the generations to come from that waste for more than 100,000 years, one can see how politically ridiculous, economically nonsensical and mind-boggling dangerous this is.

Do Japan's energy lobby and politicians really think they can manage this on such a time scale when they can't even get a grip on what happened in Fukushima?

There are reports of 250,000 tons of nuclear waste on the planet now. China and India plan to build hundreds of plants in the future. As both an optimist and a realist, I would say that our race is doomed. I hope I'm wrong.

The opinions expressed in this letter to the editor are the writer's own and do not necessarily reflect the policies of The Japan Times.

franz pichler