Bill Gates Quotes

What's all this fuss about plutonium? How can something named after a Disney character be dangerous?

Plutonium has a quite extraordinary relationship with people. They made it, and it kills them.

My job was to produce plutonium that was used for atomic bomb.

'Nuclear' is nothing but trouble. Do you say 'new-clear' or do you say 'nuke-you-ler'? Whoever invented that word had obviously never studied the human mouth. We don't have enough muscles in our face to make that group of letters come out smoothly. The word is missing a middle syllable, for cryin' out loud.

As a part of preparing those lawsuits, learning about those lawsuits, I learned about the various nuclear issues in parts of the nuclear production process I guess you'd say.

Polonium is, frankly, pretty useless, and no country in the world except Russia bothered to refine it by the late 2000s.

Unlike uranium, plutonium was created in an American lab in 1940, but scientists soon realized that it could produce even wilder chain reactions and even bigger explosions. In fact, fearing another country would create it, too, the American government went to great lengths to keep even the existence of plutonium a secret.

By developing atomic energy for peaceful purposes, you reach the nuclear option. There are no two atomic energies.

These experiments might make it possible to produce power by means of nuclear energy and radioactive elements. Unfortunately also perhaps atomic bombs.

I think, for me, nuclear is just the power, the devastation is very important to me.

If all of your electricity in your lifetime came from nuclear [energy], the waste from that lifetime of electricity would go in a Coke can.

I'm afraid there's a big confusion in the world between nuclear power and nuclear arms.

Other paths would include making nuclear fission cheap enough and safe enough that people broadly embrace it, so that could be scaled up.

I hate people. People make me pro-nuclear.

I, who had been in favour of nuclear energy for generating electricity ... I suddenly realised that anybody who has a nuclear reactor can extract the plutonium from the reactor and make nuclear weapons, so that a country which has a nuclear reactor can, at any moment that it wants to, become a nuclear weapons power. And I, right from the beginning, have been terribly worried by the existence of nuclear weapons and very much against their use.

In America, we're tired. We're exhausted in terms of nuclear.

Nuclear energy is the scientific achievement of the Iranian nation.

Our reactor actually burns nuclear waste as fuel. So not only is it safe and powerful, it solves an important issue: It actually reduces nuclear waste instead of creating. It's the reactor of your dreams.

I wouldn't call myself anti-nuclear.

Pakistan has dozens of laboratories and production and storage sites scattered across the country. After developing warheads with highly enriched uranium, it has more recently tried to do the same with more-powerful and compact plutonium.

Nuclear power is an important part of our domestic fuel mix.

My entry into the environmental arena was through the issue that so dramatically - and destructively - demonstrates the link between science and social action: nuclear weapons.

It is not productive to see things in simple black and white, and talk in either anti-nuclear or pro-nuclear terms.

If you set aside Three Mile Island and Chernobyl, the safety record of nuclear is really very good.

In the past, scientists could disclaim direct responsibility for the use to which mankind had put their disinterested discoveries. We cannot take the same attitude now because the success which we have achieved in the development of nuclear power is fraught with infinitely greater dangers than were all the inventions of the past.