What are the needs of generations yet to come? Those opposed to nuclear energy correctly question the dangers to future generations of continuing with nuclear power as a form of energy. why should
we leave nuclear waste for generations yet to come as we were left
the slag heaps of the coal industry. They question the danger from accidents at power stations built today and having their accidents. in the future. These are problems that can be and are being met by the ability of man. The volume of nuclear waste, even given the enormous expansion of nuclear energy that is likely to take place in
the next century, is of a scale and a size easily containable and
managed.
SAFETY
If in the first quarter of a century of a new form of energy there has been such a remarkable worldwide safety record, it should be
within the power of man to see that the highest possible international safety standards are enforced in the years ahead.
the
Every form of energy has its element of risk to human life.
Industrial Revolution was created upon the growth of the coal
industry. But a terrible price was paid for the extraction of the
energy that the nation needed. Between 1873 and 1938 80,000 were
killed in coal mining accidents. Many more thousands were crippled
for life, others suffered the horror of and death from
pneumoconiosis and other lung diseases. Tens of thousands were
killed during this period by smoke and by smog, and there is no
doubt that the prime cause of lung cancer and bronchial diseases in
the period prior to the clean air legislation must have been the
massive coal burn.
Gas is now one of our safest industries, but in its earlier decades
it was anything but safe. Thousands were killed by explosion and
gas poisoning.
Nuclear had to be different, for it was recognised from the
beginning that a major nuclear accident could do harm to a
substantial number of human beings compared with the individual
deaths and accidents of other forms of energy. The nuclear industry
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