American - Environmentalist | July 1, 1912 - November 5, 2000
I was actually telling people that - by harnessing the atom - we could enter a new era of unlimited power that would do away with the need to dam our beautiful streams.
David R. Brower
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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.
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There is no place where we can safely store worn-out reactors or their garbage. No place!
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We tried burying the waste at sea and the concrete cannisters that held it cracked open.
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We've pumped waste into cavities in solid rock and found that it spread through the rock.
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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?
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Yet another proposal would have us rocket the waste into the sun, but, as you're probably aware, about one in ten of our space shots doesn't quite make it out of the earth's gravitational field.
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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.
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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.
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I don't think we have very good records about what they were thinking except, as I pointed out earlier today, that they did invent our political system.
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The risk presented by these lethal wastes is like no other risk, and we should not be expected to accept it or to project it into the future in order for manufacturers and utilities to make a dollar killing now.
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Even if you build the perfect reactor, you're still saddled with a people problem and an equipment problem.
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