2 Letters

Dearest Forbes Magazine:

We were pleased and frankly shocked to discover that you had selected Twin Oaks to be one of 8 modern utopias. We were surprised that the "Capitalist Tool" selected an organization with "from each according to their ability, to each according to their need" in it's by-laws as a model to be emulated.

From a classical business perspective it is perhaps easier to understand how a mostly untrained group having amassed a $10 million fixed plant and sitting on over $1.7 million in our self insurance funds might be chosen for your recognition. Members of our community receive and allowance of $76 per month and collective decide how to spend the money which comes in from our 5 major businesses.

We don't consider ourselves to be a utopia, but there is basically no crime, no unemployment, and an idyllic self sustaining environment here. So perhaps some Forbes readers disillusioned with the dog-eat-dog world will drop out of the mainstream and consider coming to our unusual place. Which we joke is "not utopia, but on a good day you can see it from here". And there are a lot of good days.

Paxus Calta
co-manager of Outreach
Twin Oaks Community

To the Editors of the Central Virginian (incomplete)

Wednesday Nuclear Regulatory Commission public hearing was an amazing exercise in cherry picking data. The NRC themselves informed us that the chance of a serious accident at the proposed new reactor at North Anna was 1 in 10 million years. They came to this estimate using data about the design of the proposed reactor and performance of the existing US fleet. Of course in well under 10,000 operating years there was a partial meltdown at the Three Mile Island plant outside Harrisburg PA in 1979. We are told, incredibly, that the NRC left this major accident out of the data, because the plant is no longer operating.

Listeners were told repeatedly that nuclear power is cheap. That the two North Anna plants provide electricity at well below the costs of fossil and renewable fuels. All true. However, this is perhaps not the best way to estimate the operating costs of a new reactor.

In 2002 the generally pro-nuclear US Department of Energy funded Sandia National Laboratories produced a report saying that wind power was competitive with new nuclear plants. Since then the price of wind power has decreased and nuclear has increased. What is perhaps most telling is that neither Dominion will not release the price of the "Economically Simplified Boiling Water Reactor" they are considering.