Nuclear power

Nuclear power, or nuclear energy, is the use of exothermic nuclear processes to generate useful heat and electricity. The term includes nuclear fission, nuclear decay and nuclear fusion. Nuclear power stations provided about 5.7% of the world's energy and 13% of the world's electricity in 2012. There is an ongoing debate about nuclear power, with proponents contending that nuclear power is a safe, sustainable energy source that reduces carbon emissions, and opponents contending that nuclear power poses threats to people and the environment.

Our children will enjoy in their homes electrical energy too cheap to meter. ~ Lewis L. Strauss

Nuclear know-how without nuclear infrastructure doesn't get you very much. A racecar driver without a car can't drive. A pilot without a plan can't fly. ~ Benjamin Netanyahu

If reactors were safe, nuclear industries would not demand government-guaranteed, accident-liability protection, as a condition for their generating electricity. ~ Kristin Shrader-Frechette

So long as you were limited to fighting among yourselves -- with your primitive tanks and planes -- we were unconcerned. But soon you will apply atomic energy to space ships -- and then you become a threat to the peace and security of other planets. That, of course, we cannot tolerate. ~ Edmund H. North

Fission is a process of deadly fascination; had nature chosen her constants just a little differently, we should have been deprived of its potential for social good and spared its power for social evil. Despite the former and despite the undeniable fact that the latter is responsible for nuclear and particle physics being decades in advance of what would otherwise have been their time, I know what my own choice for the constants would have been. ~ Sir Denys Wilkinson

Arranged alphabetically by author or source:
A · B · C · D · E · F · G · H · I · J · K · L · M · N · O · P · Q · R · S · T · U · V · W · X · Y · Z · See also · External links

Quotes

A

• Normally you have to wait for generations to see the effect of the environment on mutations, and most mutant animals are pretty damaged so don’t live long. In a world affected by climate change, we really need to understand nuclear energy as an option, and its potential effects on natural populations. We know that exposure to acute radiation is terrible, but actually low levels are nowhere near as bad as we think. And many of the animals around Chernobyl have actually done very well, because the humans left – and it turns out we are way worse than radiation.

• Stuart Auld of Stirling’s faculty of natural sciences Animals deformed by Chernobyl (1st February 2022)

C

• The general question of nuclear power is not a simple one. It is hardly necessary to stress how dangerous it is after the Fukushima nuclear disaster, which has far from ended. Continued use of fossil fuels threatens global disaster, and not in the distant future. The sensible course would be to move as quickly as possible to sustainable energy sources, as Germany is now doing. The alternatives are too disastrous to contemplate.
  • Noam Chomsky, Truth to power, The Japan Times, (February 22, 2014)

• As I said, there is some merit in these views [that nuclear power is the "only way to save the planet from cooking"]. More accurately, there would be if limited and short-term reliance on nuclear energy, with all of its extreme hazards and unsolved problems — like waste disposal — was taken as an opportunity for rapid and extensive development of sustainable energy. That should be the highest priority, and very quickly, because severe threats of environmental catastrophe are not remote.
  • Noam Chomsky, Truth to power, The Japan Times, (February 22, 2014)

E

• The release of atomic energy has not created a new problem. It has merely made more urgent the necessity of solving an existing one.
  • Albert Einstein, Statement on the Atomic Bomb to Raymond Swing, before 1 October 1945, as reported in Atlantic Monthly, vol. 176, no. 5 (November 1945), in Einstein on Politics, p. 373

F

• If reactors were safe, nuclear industries would not demand government-guaranteed, accident-liability protection, as a condition for their generating electricity.

• Kristin Shrader-Frechette, "Cheaper, safer alternatives than nuclear fission", Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, (19 August 2011).

G

• In reality, the story of nuclear power development in the US over the last 50 years is beyond pitiful and would not pass muster under any “normal” business plan. How the nuclear industry gets away with it remains baffling... All of this should send an obvious message to the deaf ears of Ben Cardin (D-MD), Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) and Cory Booker (D-NJ), the leading pro-nuclear evangelists in the U.S. Senate. Cardin’s power production credit bill actually has the gall to describe nuclear power as “zero-emission”, a lie that even Cardin’s own staffer was forced to concede in a recent meeting attended by Paul Gunter who called him out on it... Like the three not-so-wise monkeys, those Senators and their colleagues will acknowledge no negatives about nuclear power, even as the industry’s appalling litany of financial fiascoes and failures stares them in the face. They will forge right ahead, thus dooming to its own failure the very progress on climate change they claim to champion.
  • The Record-Breaking Failures of Nuclear Power, Linda Gunter, Counter Punch, (24 September 2021)

K

• No man can fully grasp how far and how fast we have come, but condense, if you will, the 50 thousand years of man's recorded history in a time span of but a half-century. Stated in these terms, we know very little about the first 40 years, except at the end of them advanced man had learned to use the skins of animals to cover them. Then about 10 years ago, under this standard, man emerged from his caves to construct other kinds of shelter. Only five years ago man learned to write and use a cart with wheels. Christianity began less than two years ago. The printing press came this year, and then less than two months ago, during this whole 50-year span of human history, the steam engine provided a new source of power. Newton explored the meaning of gravity. Last month electric lights and telephones and automobiles and airplanes became available. Only last week did we develop penicillin and television and nuclear power, and now if America's new spacecraft succeeds in reaching Venus, we will have literally reached the stars before midnight tonight.
  • John F. Kennedy, Address at Rice University on the Nation's Space Effort, Houston, TX (12 September 1962)

• The Green New Deal will need to be subject to constant vigilance and pressure from experts who understand exactly what it will take to lower our emissions as rapidly as science demands, and from social movements that have decades of experience bearing the brunt of false climate solutions, whether nuclear power, the chimera of carbon capture and storage, or carbon offsets. But in remaining vigilant, we also have to be careful not to bury the overarching message: that this is a potential lifeline that we all have a sacred and moral responsibly to reach for.
  • Naomi Klein in The Battle Lines Have Been Drawn on the Green New Deal, The Intercept, (13 February 2019)

M

• Emancipate yourselves from mental slavery;
  None but ourselves can free our minds.
  Have no fear for atomic energy,
  cause none of them can stop the time.
  • Bob Marley Jamaican musician, singer-songwriter and Rastafarian: Redemption Song

• I happen to be one who believes that we will not get very far in working out a peace program, or in lowering the suspicious fingers which are now being pointed toward America by other nations of the world, until we recognize that, after all, the secret of atomic energy does not belong to America, but that, instead, it belongs to all mankind.
  • Wayne Morse, remarks in the Senate (October 22, 1945), Congressional Record, vol. 91, p. 9893.

N

• Nuclear know-how without nuclear infrastructure doesn't get you very much. A racecar driver without a car can't drive. A pilot without a plane can't fly.
  • Benjamin Netanyahu, address to a joint meeting of the United States Congress (3 March 2015), Washington, D.C.

• Klaatu: So long as you were limited to fighting among yourselves -- with your primitive tanks and planes -- we were unconcerned. But soon you will apply atomic energy to space ships -- and then you become a threat to the peace and security of other planets. That, of course, we cannot tolerate.
  • Edmund H. North, The Day the Earth Stood Still, (1951).

O

• First, in dealing with those nations that break rules and laws, I believe that we must develop alternatives to violence that are tough enough to actually change behavior – for if we want a lasting peace, then the words of the international community must mean something. Those regimes that break the rules must be held accountable. Sanctions must exact a real price. Intransigence must be met with increased pressure – and such pressure exists only when the world stands together as one. One urgent example is the effort to prevent the spread of nuclear weapons, and to seek a world without them. In the middle of the last century, nations agreed to be bound by a treaty whose bargain is clear: All will have access to peaceful nuclear power; those without nuclear weapons will forsake them; and those with nuclear weapons will work towards disarmament. I am committed to upholding this treaty. It is a centerpiece of my foreign policy. And I’m working with President Medvedev to reduce America and Russia’s nuclear stockpiles. But it is also incumbent upon all of us to insist that nations like Iran and North Korea do not game the system. Those who claim to respect international law cannot avert their eyes when those laws are flouted. Those who care for their own security cannot ignore the danger of an arms race in the Middle East or East Asia. Those who seek peace cannot stand idly by as nations arm themselves for nuclear war. The same principle applies to those who violate international laws by brutalizing their own people. When there is genocide in Darfur, systematic rape in Congo, repression in Burma – there must be consequences. Yes, there will be engagement; yes, there will be diplomacy – but there must be consequences when those things fail. And the closer we stand together, the less likely we will be faced with the choice between armed intervention and complicity in oppression.
  • Barack Obama, 2009 Nobel Lecture, 10 December 2009

P

• What if Roosevelt and Churchill had accepted the proposals from Bohr, Szilard, and others to internationalize the project? Would an arms race with Russia still have resulted? The answer is probably yes. Bohr's idealistic concept was essentially a free exchange of information internationally. All nations would pool scientific knowledge, rather than keep it secret. An international body consisting mainly of scientists would oversee its exploitation. These ideas harked back to the free flow of information about physics in the fifty years before the Second World War, a period Bohr regarded as a golden age. However, not only times but nuclear physics had changed. Nuclear physics was by then perceived as having not only massive military potential but real commercial value for power generation. But these factors conferred great diplomatic, economic, and political power. For Stalin, possession of nuclear capability had immense importance, both symbolically and practically. Generation of electricity from nuclear power had the potential to achieve his long stated aim to "catch up and overtake" the West in terms of industrialization. Nuclear weapons would give him the ability to rule over his increasing empire in Eastern Europe, while allowing him to appear as, and to act as, the equal or the best of the West elsewhere. Western lack of trust in a totalitarian regime made a race inevitable.
  • Diana Preston, Before the Fallout: from Marie Curie to Hiroshima (2005)

R

• A paper reactor [new reactor concept] has the following characteristics: it is simple; it is small; it is cheap; it is lightweight; it can be built very quickly; very little development is required and it will use off the shelf components; it is in the study phase and not being built now. By contrast a real reactor has the following characteristics: it is complicated; it is large; it is heavy; it is being built now; it is behind schedule; it requires an immense amount of development on apparently trivial items; it takes a long time to build because of its engineering development problems.
  • Hyman G. Rickover in The Rickover Effect (1992) by Theodore Rockwell, Naval Institute Press (pp. 158-159)

S

• And Lord, we are especially thankful for nuclear power, the cleanest, safest energy source there is. Except for solar, which is just a pipe dream.
  • Homer Simpson quoted by Damon Cronshaw in "Topics: Is talk of nuclear power in Australia a red herring for coal?" Newcastle Herald (July 26 2019)
• Our children will enjoy in their homes electrical energy too cheap to meter.
  • Lewis L. Strauss, chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission, speech at the 20th anniversary of the National Association of Science Writers, New York City (September 16, 1954); reported in The New York Times (September 17, 1954), p. 5.

• Thus, the words "nuclear energy" have many interpretations. As they bring to mind the terrifying spectre of a war of exploding A-bombs and H-bombs, they are horrible words. Yet those same words, used to describe the many uses of the atom for man's peaceful progress -- in medicine, agriculture, biology, industry and the production of electric power -- bear no relation of association to the uncontrolled fury of the atom as it might be employed in war. And finally, the words "nuclear energy" as they relate to the controlled testing of nuclear weapons so that we may be assured of the means of defending ourselves, ought not to be confused with the unrestrained use of large numbers of such weapons in actual warfare.
  • Lewis Strauss, "Remarks Prepared by Lewis L. Strauss, Chairman, U. S. Atomic Energy Commission, for delivery to Joint U.S .- Canada Civil Defense Committee Battle Creek, Michigan, Oct. 19, 1956"

T

• 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.
  • Edward Teller, 2 page advertisement sponsored by Dresser Industries in the Wall Street Journal (31 July 1979)

V

• In some sense, nuclear fission is not one of those developments in physics which arose logically and systematically in the course of progress. There was a great deal of accident and surprise in the process.
  • John von Neumann: (November 1955)"Impact of Atomic Energy on the Physical and Chemical Sciences (Speech at M.I.T. Alumni Day Symposium, June 13, 1955)". Tech. Rev.: 15–17.

W

• Fission is a process of deadly fascination; had nature chosen her constants just a little differently, we should have been deprived of its potential for social good and spared its power for social evil. Despite the former and despite the undeniable fact that the latter is responsible for nuclear and particle physics being decades in advance of what would otherwise have been their time, I know what my own choice for the constants would have been.
  • Sir Denys Wilkinson, medalist of the Royal Society, Comments on Nuclear and Particle Physics 2, 146 (1968).

See also

• Chernobyl disaster
• Nuclear weapon