A Quote by Robert Reich
No company can be expected to build a nuclear reactor, an oil well, a coal mine, or anything else that's one hundred percent safe under all circumstances. The costs would be prohibitive. It's unreasonable to expect corporations to totally guard against small chances of every potential accident.
Related Quotes
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.
You may reasonably expect a man to walk a tightrope safely for ten minutes; it would be unreasonable to do so without accident for two hundred years.
Letting the perfect be the enemy of the good is one of the reasons we have a coal-dependent infrastructure, with the resulting environmental impact that all of us can see. I suspect environmentalists, through their opposition of nuclear power, have caused more coal plants to be built than anybody. And those coal plants have emitted more radioactive material from the coal than any nuclear accident would have.
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.
In the spring of 2007, Israeli intelligence brought to Washington proof that the Assad regime in Syria was building a nuclear reactor along the Euphrates - with North Korean help. This reactor was a copy of the Yongbyon reactor the North Koreans had built, and was part of a Syrian nuclear weapons program.
When experts say nuclear power generation is safe and doesn't cost much and this is the only way to go if we want to stop relying on coal, well, we believe them. But they've been lying to us for years. And the point is, we've never really known anything about nuclear power generation. We had little interest in it before 3/11, and we certainly had no idea how difficult it is to control nuclear energy.
Speaking about our largest oil company Rosneft, and I recalled in the beginning that almost 20 percent of it [19.7] belongs to BP. Who's company is that? British Petroleum, isn't it? I suppose that is not bad. I have to tell that British Petroleum's capitalization is significantly related to the fact that it owns more than 19 percent of Rosneft, which has vast oil reserves both in Russia and abroad. This has its impact on the company's stability as well.
Is a park any better than a coal mine? What's a mountain got that a slag pile hasn't? What would you rather have in your garden--an almond tree or an oil well?
There was a concept a long time ago that you would do a different type of reactor called a "fast reactor," that would make a bunch of another element called plutonium, and then you would pull that out, and then you would burn that. That's called "breeding" in a fast reactor. That is bad because plutonium is nuclear weapons material. It's messy. The processing you have to get through is not only environmentally difficultly, it's extremely expensive.
If success or failure of this planet and of human beings depended on how I am and what I do... How would I be? What would I do? We may now care for each Earthian individual at a sustainable billionaire's level of affluence while living exclusively on less than 1 percent of our planet's daily energy income from our cosmically designed nuclear reactor, the Sun, optimally located 92 million safe miles away from us.
The total amount of energy we use every year - from coal, oil, natural gas, hydro, nuclear, and everything else - is dwarfed by the amount of solar energy hitting the planet each year.
The bulk of the utility industry today believes that coal and nuclear are the only solutions we have. Nuclear is greener but has the other issues. Coal, they think, can be transformed into the so-called clean coal technologies.
The concept of this so-called "TerraPower reactor" is that you, in the same reactor, you both burn and breed. So, instead of making plutonium and then extracting it, we take uranium - the 99.3 percent that you normally don't do anything with - we convert that, and we burn it.
Human progress depends on unreasonable people. Reasonable people accept the world as they meet it; unreasonable people persist in trying to change it. Well, I'm Bob and I'm an unreasonable person. And if TED is anything, it is the olympics of unreasonable people.
The sun is the only safe nuclear reactor, situated as it is some ninety-three million miles away.
On May 7, a few weeks after the accident at Three-Mile Island, I was in Washington. I was there to refute some of that propaganda that Ralph Nader, Jane Fonda and their kind are spewing to the news media in their attempt to frighten people away from nuclear power. I am 71 years old, and I was working 20 hours a day. The strain was too much. The next day, I suffered a heart attack. You might say that I was the only one whose health was affected by that reactor near Harrisburg. No, that would be wrong. It was not the reactor. It was Jane Fonda. Reactors are not dangerous.
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