 Apollo 13, as you may remember, gave us a reactor that is bubbling away right now somewhere in the Pacific. It's supposed to be bubbling away on the moon, but it's in the Pacific Ocean instead. |
| What's even more unsettling is the way these people hide what they're doing from the public. They strip the labels off miracle wheat when they ship it, for instance, and say, 'Watch out. Don't plant too much and don't depend on it too much.' |
| Is the minor convenience of allowing the present generation the luxury of doubling its energy consumption every 10 years worth the major hazard of exposing the next 20,000 generations to this lethal waste? |
| We are at the edge of an abyss and we're close to being irrevocably lost. |
| When people say, 'You're not being realistic,' they're just trying to tag some thoughts that they can't otherwise handle. |
| I sort of kept my hand in writing and went to work for the Sierra Club in '52, walked the plank there in '69, founded Friends of the Earth and the League of Conservation Voters after that. |
| I will say this, - though: If it is true that fusion will put unlimited amounts of energy into our hands, then I'm worried. Our record on this score is extremely poor. |
| It's like turning the space program over to the Long Island Railroad. |
| A great deal of pressure was then built up to remove me from the club and my resignation was, finally, a forced one. |
| There are many different kinds of radioactive waste and each has its own half-life so, just to be on the safe side and to simplify matters, I base my calculations on the worst one and that's plutonium. |
| We've pumped waste into cavities in solid rock and found that it spread through the rock. |
| Perhaps most ridiculous of all is the suggestion that we 'keep' our radioactive garbage for the use of our descendants. This 'solution', I think, requires an immediate poll of the next 20,000 generations. |
| Once we open the door to the plutonium economy, we expose ourselves to absolutely terrible, horrifying risks from these people. |
| There is no place where we can safely store worn-out reactors or their garbage. No place! |
| For how many people do you think might yet stand on this planet before the sun grows cold? That's the responsibility we hold in our hands. |
| What happens when the guy who runs the reactor gets out of bed wrong or decides, for some reason, that he wants to override his instruction sheet some afternoon? |
| Some otherwise sane scientists have seriously proposed that we tuck this deadly garbage under the edges of drifting continents but how can they be sure the moving land masses will climb over the waste and not just push it forward? |
| It seems that every time mankind is given a lot of energy, we go out and wreck something with it. |
| At that time a senator who was on the Joint Committee of Atomic Energy said rather quietly, 'You know, we're having a little problem with waste these days.' I didn't know what he meant then, but I know now. |
| Until four years ago, in fact, I was absolutely in love with the atom. |
