Burton Richter Quotes

None of us are nuclear experts, but we know that if there is a melt-down and breach of containment, that's clearly the most odious thing that could happen.

It's ridiculous that time and time again we need a radioactive cloud coming out of a nuclear power-station to remind us that atomic energy is extraordinarily dangerous.

Look at Fukushima. Should we or should we not agree with the U.S. government that none of that radioactive energy is making its way here? Hello!

Of all the failed technologies that litter the onward march of science - steam carriages, zeppelins, armoured trains - none has been so catastrophic to prosperity as the last century's attempt to generate electricity from nuclear fission.

What are the odds that a nuclear emergency like the one at Fukushima Dai-ichi could happen in the central or eastern United States? They'd have to be astronomical, right?

Five years after the Chernobyl disaster, in the summer of 1991, the last summer the Soviet Union was still in existence, I visited Ukraine. I trekked out to the 20-mile exclusion zone - it had been cleared of all people after the accident - together with some local environmental activists.

The nuclear industry has this amazing record, even equipment from generations one and two. But nuclear mishaps tend to come in these big events - Chernobyl, Three Mile Island, and now Fukushima - so it's more visible.

I was 15 when Chernobyl happened, I've been vaguely thinking about it for most of my life. But somewhere around 2015, it occurred to me that I didn't know how it happened, which seemed like a pretty bizarre lapse in my understanding of the world and how it functions.

We should show Chernobyl to the world: scientists, environmental specialists, historians and tourists.

My hope and my intention was that people would experience the tragedy of what Chernobyl was in every regard: a scientific tragedy, a political tragedy, an emotional and personal tragedy, all of that.

With something like Chernobyl, the public reaction was 'Oh, my God, science has really done wrong.'

Nuclear accidents anywhere can affect people everywhere.

And at ten, or whatever time, in the morning we had the press conference, what we knew is there had been an incident at Three Mile Island, that it was shut down, that there was water that had escaped but it was contained.

After Chernobyl, thousands and thousands of people, if not millions, were given a death penalty and had to pay the price, our father among them.

These nuclear plants are more dangerous than people realize.

Everybody after Fukushima had to reassess the safety of nuclear. When I set out to design a reactor, I knew it had to be passive and intrinsically safe.

The Department of Energy's nuclear weapons production program have direct and potentially devastating medical implications.... A public health emergency exists.

The Three Mile Island Report to President Carter, if published in its entirety, would have destroyed the civilian nuclear power industry because the accident at Three Mile Island was infinitely more dangerous than was ever made public.

I rise today to commemorate one of the most fateful days in the history of the State of Colorado, the day the Rocky Flats Nuclear Weapons Plant outside of Boulder nearly became America's own Chernobyl, some 30 years before that terrible accident in the Ukraine.

My Miyoshi studio in Japan is located in the northern part of Saitama, which puts it in quite close proximity to Fukushima. As such, we can feel the effects of radiation.

The Soviet State had never made radiation something that was publicized in any way, shape, or form. In fact, the Soviet Union had experienced a number of serious accidents involving radiation since the 1950s and had covered it up a number of times.

'Chernobyl' is a human story. It's not a disaster movie. It's not about explosions. It's about people and truths and lies.

In fact, all of us have a piece of Chernobyl in our bodies going back to 1986.

Cesium, iodine from the Chernobyl reactor accident went around the world many times and everyone on the Earth has a piece of Chernobyl in their bodies, but it's very tiny - too small to cause much damage.

When I started walking and I looked down and I saw on the floor this water, which looked like, you know, water in your basement except it happened to be in the auxiliary building of a nuclear power plant.