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Nuclear Energy Quotes

Quotes tagged as "nuclear-energy" Showing 1-11 of 11
Svetlana Alexievich
“At that time my notions of nuclear power were utterly idyllic. At school and at the university we'd been taught that this was a magical factory that made "energy out of nothing," where people in white robes sat and pushed buttons. Chernobyl blew up when we weren't prepared.”
Svetlana Alexievich, Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster

Edward Teller
“The scientist is not responsible for the laws of nature. It is his job to find out how these laws operate. It is the scientist’s job to find the ways in which these laws can serve the human will. However, it is not the scientist’s job to determine whether a hydrogen bomb should be constructed, whether it should be used, or how it should be used. This responsibility rests with the American people and with their chosen representatives.”
Edward Teller

E.A. Bucchianeri
“I dispute the point that nuclear energy is 'clean' and 'cost-effective'. As I recall, when we first harnessed nuclear power it was to drop an atom bomb on a civilian population, not to save the environment. However, you must admit, the victors are never tried for war crimes.”
E.A. Bucchianeri, Brushstrokes of a Gadfly

Edward Teller
“Today, nothing is unusual about a scientific discovery's being followed soon after by a technical application: The discovery of electrons led to electronics; fission led to nuclear energy. But before the 1880's, science played almost no role in the advances of technology. For example, James Watt developed the first efficient steam engine long before science established the equivalence between mechanical heat and energy.”
Edward Teller

Svetlana Alexievich
“I remembered some lines from the papers: our nuclear stations are absolutely safe, we could build one on Red Square, they're safer than samovars. They're like stars and we'll "light" the whole earth with them.”
Svetlana Alexievich, Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster

Steven Magee
“The Fukushima nuclear complex went on to become the worst man-made engineering disaster in all of human history, outside of war.”
Steven Magee, Health Forensics

Steven Magee
“The USA government states that the New Mexico Trinity nuclear bomb site is still highly radioactive and 'harmless'. It is interesting to note in the era of Electromagnetic Hypersensitivity (EHS) that it is USA government policy that radio frequency (RF) and electricity are also 'harmless'.”
Steven Magee

Serhii Plokhy
“The world has already been overwhelmed by one Chernobyl and one exclusion zone. It cannot afford any more. It must learn its lessons from what happened in and around Chernobyl on April 26, 1986.”
Serhii Plokhy, Chernobyl: The History of a Nuclear Catastrophe

Varun Sivaram
“Because both nuclear and fossil plants are widely used in today’s power sector, building them into the future electricity mix would be least disruptive to the status quo.”
Varun Sivaram, Taming the Sun: Innovations to Harness Solar Energy and Power the Planet

Jean Baudrillard
“The catastrophe that lies in wait for us is not connected to a depletion of resources. Energy itself, in all its forms, will become more and more abundant (at any rate, within the broadest time frame that could conceivably concern us as humans). Nuclear energy is inexhaustible, as are solar energy, the force of the tides, of the great fluxes of nature, and indeed of natural catastrophes, earthquakes and volcanoes (and technological imagination may be relied on to find ways and means to harness them). What is alarming, by contrast, is the dynamics of disequilibrium, the uncontrollability of the energy system itself, which is capable of getting out of hand in deadly fashion in very short order.
We have already had a few spectacular demonstrations of the consequences of the liberation of nuclear energy (Hiroshima, Chernobyl), but it must be remembered that any chain reaction at all, viral or radioactive, has catastrophic potential. Our degree of protection from pandemics is epitomized by the utterly useless glacis that often surrounds nuclear power stations. It is not impossible that the whole system of world-transformation through energy has already entered a virulent and epidemic stage corresponding to the most essential character of energy itself: a fall, a differential, an imbalance - a catastrophe in miniature which to begin with has positive effects but which, once overtaken by its own impetus, assumes the dimensions of a global catastrophe.”
Jean Baudrillard, The Transparency of Evil: Essays in Extreme Phenomena

“Nuclear waste is unlike other wastes. It is not only the danger…but the timescale. Trash inside a landfill might decay over decades, plastics over hundreds or thousands of years - the truth is we don’t know yet. But the half-life of Plutonium-239 created inside the reactor cores of nuclear power plants is 24,100 years. Uranium-235, the fuel used to power the reactors, has a half-life of 700 million years. To dispose of nuclear waste is to think in geological time. Uranium is older than the Earth, forged more than 6 billion years ago by exploding supernovae and colliding neutron stars. It is, by any measure, a miraculous element: a single pellet barely larger than a multivitamin can generate as much energy as a ton of coal, without any direct carbon emissions”
Oliver Franklin-Wallis, Wasteland: The Secret World of Waste and the Urgent Search for a Cleaner Future