In today's Evansville Courier & Press, I saw an Associated Press article entitled, "Paducah Power Plant Must do Drug Testing." It sounds reasonable that any power plant should conduct random drug testing to ensure safety and responsibility on the job, but when you take into account that the Paducah, Kentucky plant is a nuclear power plant, this concept seems to be even more of a no-brainer. It was kind of shocking to read that this order had to come down from the inspector general's office to make it stick and that the testing is only required to be done on "certain employees." The article doesn't explain who these certain employees are (just saying a "variety," including those carrying firearms) but one hopes that they are any individuals who have even a remote connection to running a nuclear power plant. Wait...Wouldn't this be anyone working in the plant?? At any rate, this mandate came "five months after an employee at the Paducah plant tested positive for methamphetamine, and more than a year after a bag of meth and pipes were found outside a building in a limited security area of the compound." One employee was banned from the plant after a positive drug test.

The scary thing is that even if nuclear power plants are supposed to be safer since the Three Mile Island near-disaster and the Chernobyl catastrophe, a precarious situation can be created by employees under the influence of drugs. It is astounding to think that drug testing was not strictly enforced before the inspector general said it had to be done and particularly, after these drug-related incidents at the plant. When Dick Cheney promoted nuclear power on T.V. because it is supposedly clean and safe, did he comprehend that some of the workers near these radioactive materials would be doing drugs? If we are even going to consider using nuclear power today and in the future, we had better be sure that there is no room for minds clouded with alcohol or drugs in the plants. These substances create an even greater chance that human error will impair the safe use of nuclear power. This danger gives rise to another argument in favor of wind power or solar power--i.e. the safety from an operational standpoint; even if human error were to impede the operation of a wind turbine or solar tower, it would still be a whole lot safer than a nuclear disaster.