Jeremy Rifkin (a.k.a. "the most hated man in science" -- Scientific American, August 1997) is at it again with his Luddite views and latest pseudoscience book, "The Hydrogen Economy: The Creation of the World Wide Energy Web and the Redistribution of Power on Earth." He advocates the hydrogen economy, which sounds great, yet currently the energy web he proposes is technically nonfeasible and to some physicists, it appears theoretically impossible. (Maybe we can violate some laws of physics?)

That said, we just might get some kind of hydrogen economy in about 50 years, although only a fraction of what Rifkin ("Nuclear energy still a bad idea," Oct. 3) and others envision. And if we are equally lucky -- another far shot -- we might get hydrogen fusion. Don't hold your breath for either.

In the meantime, we have to live with existing technologies, and state-of-the-art nuclear reactors are about as distant from Chernobyl as modern jetliners are from the Wright Brothers’ flyer. The new pebble-bed nuclear reactors are fail-safe; they cannot melt down. Furthermore, reactors can be built that will produce less of the nuclear waste that current ones do. Where to put any waste? Perhaps Yucca Mountain, but as has been known by scientists for decades, we can encase the wastes and drop them in the middle of the North Pacific, since it is a biological desert at the surface and even more bleak at the bottom. The wastes would sink deep into the bottom's sediments some 20,000 feet below the surface. No terrorist could retrieve them.

Current alternatives to the nuclear option include the following:

We could drill for oil off all of our shores. So long as we are feeding our SUVs, we might as well do it with U.S. oil, not overseas oil. We can switch to biofuels, but in the near future, that can only support some of our petro-thirst. Wind energy is good when the wind is blowing, solar energy when the sun shines. Geothermal has great potential, but hot springs are sacred to many Native Americans, and so are off limits. That leaves hydropower. Should we build dams to create a few dozen more Hetch Hetchy Reservoirs? Of course, all of us could conserve our energy use, which would go a far way toward reducing our foreign-oil dependence, now at about 62 percent of our total consumption.

Regardless of what we do, China and India each will eventually build two or three dozen nuclear power plants. They will need them to replace their dirty coal-burning power plants, and each country plans on rapidly building hundreds more of these to provide energy until nuclear power comes on line. China's coal pollution blows across to California and our air quality will worsen in the coming decades, and add to global warming. In the September issue of Scientific American, two MIT professors advocate the nuclear option (and address Rifkin's criticisms). Most important is the first sentence: "A threefold expansion of nuclear power could contribute significantly to staving off climate change by avoiding one billion to two billion tons of carbon emissions annually."

(Schaffer lives in Napa.)