TNAG-1498-FCO40-2056-Guangdong-nuclear-power-station-project-at-Daya-Bay-safety-c-1986 — Page 85

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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