Nuclear power

Nuclear power is the process of gaining electricity through nuclear means.

Sourced

• 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
• 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 and 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 pp. 158-159 The Rickover Effect (1992) by Theodore Rockwell, Naval Institute Press

Unsourced

• "At present, atomic power presents an exceptionally costly and inconvenient means of obtaining energy which can be extracted more economically from conventional fuels....The economics of atomic power are not attractive at present, nor are they likely to be for a long time in the future. This is expensive power, not cheap power as the public as been led to believe."
  • C.G. Suits (Vice-President and Director of Research of General Electric, in a December 1950 speech.)

• "For 50 years, nuclear power has been a solution in search of a problem."
  • George Monbiot

• It is not too much to expect that our children will enjoy in their homes [nuclear generated] electrical energy too cheap to meter.
  • Lewis Strauss, Chairman, US Atomic Energy Commission, 1954.

• "The energy produced by breaking down the atom is a very poor kind of thing. Anyone who expects a source of power from the transformations of these atoms is talking moonshine."
  • Lord Ernest Rutherford

• The energy potentially available to us is for all practical purposes unlimited; but access to it is blocked. It is blocked, above all, by anti-technology sentiment, environmental paranoia, and interference in natural markets. Beyond these obstacles, there is little that science and technology cannot eventually overcome. We further believe that pollution and destruction of the environment is not an essential by product of technology; on the contrary, more science and better technology are needed to keep the environment clean.
  • Petr Beckmann, Access to Energy[1], 1 September 1973

• "The last people you'd want deciding what to do with nuclear waste are politicians."
  • Ian Campbell, Australian Federal Environment Minister

• "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

See Also

• Nuclear war