Nuclear Accidents Quotes

Today, nuclear power provides 20 percent of power in the United States.

Several highly improbable and therefore unforeseen failures.

Nuclear arms and atomic power represent a technology in which coexistence with man is extremely difficult.

I think we should stop using nuclear power plants because it's an old system that we can't control.

The reward for using the atom's power towards man's welfare is great and sure. The punishment for its misuse would seem to be death and the destruction of the civilization that has been growing for a thousand years.

The central government wants to increase the number of nuclear power plants but we believe nuclear plants have their inherent problems.

For 50 years, nuclear power stations have produced three products which only a lunatic could want: bomb-explosive plutonium, lethal radioactive waste and electricity so dear it has to be heavily subsidised. They leave to future generations the task, and most of the cost, of making safe sites that have been polluted half-way to eternity.

I do not believe that nuclear power is worth it, if it creates radiation.

The biggest risks posed by nuclear power come not from the technology but from the human institutions that govern how we use it.

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

American nuclear reactors are well into middle age. The median age of an operating reactor in the U.S. is 34 years, placing start-up in midst of the Carter administration.

Nuclear energy, in terms of an overall safety record, is better than other energy.

'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.

I wouldn't call myself anti-nuclear.

No nuclear weapon has detonated. Some nuclear weapons have exploded and spread radioactive plutonium…. The nuclear weapons of today are much safer than those of the 1980s. I worry about the way they are managed however.

I want to work hard toward my goal that there will be zero nuclear power generation.

In survey after survey, people report that the greatest dangers they face are, in this order: terrorist attack, plane crashes and nuclear accidents. This despite the fact that these three combined have killed fewer people in the past half-century than car accidents do in any given year.

Unprecedented opportunities for new scientific experience ...

While many technological measures can be taken to secure safety at nuclear power plants, such measures on their own cannot cover great risks.

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.

Chernobyl happened in April of 1986. A few months earlier, in January 1986, the Challenger space shuttle exploded. It did not have the impact on the environment and the amount of lives that Chernobyl did, but it was the result of the same exact problem: a failure of a lot of people and institutions over a long period of time.

In the Navy, I slept mere feet from a nuclear reactor, so I have no knee-jerk opposition to traditional reactors.

The lesson of Chernobyl is not an indictment of nuclear power as such. Nuclear power, designed well, regulated properly, cared for meticulously, has a place in the world’s energy supply.

One significant indication of the effectiveness of deterrence is that the Soviet Union and the United States share the belief that a nuclear war would begin only out of desperation or inadvertence. A weakening of deterrence could increase the possibility of a calculated “voluntary” war or worse.

Nuclear proliferation - the proliferation of WMDs altogether - is one of the greatest dangers of our time.