To the editor:

I want to thank Mike Trimble for his Oct. 3 letter responding to a Sept. 26 letter about fear of trace elements from the Ameren Missouri plant in Oakville.

Mr. Trimble states he lives within a mile of the plant and is aware of a “whole potential litany of trace elements discharged at some level through its smoke stacks.”

I, too, am aware and not concerned — even if I lived within a mile of the plant. 

Driving those who produce electricity to standards of a level of purity in our environment that equals Eden is unattainable.

And not rational. There is a certain level of “danger” that we accept in order to have what we have — the comfort and reliability of electricity at a moderate cost.

Bureaucracies like the Environmental Protection Agency will always up the standards for industry.

This gives them much power over the producers and us. The EPA is for anything that is not yet practical, affordable and proven reliable — claiming there is danger in this kind of energy, but no danger in solar or wind or harm to the environment.

This is false and if one studies up on solar and wind power, they will understand it is not what the conga line of green crusaders claims it to be. There are environmental costs to any product we buy and use.

What strikes me is how these fears of danger are the concerns of people in the First World.

We don’t have Third World life and death struggles for food and clean water, so we replace that with something else — like minute trace elements from a plant.

Next will it be secondhand hair spray?