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on agriculture with consequent possibilities of starvation of millions and millions of people. It is therefore quite
ssential that the burning of fossil fuels is contained and reduced drastically. This is one of the main reasons why it is essential to develop alternate methods of producing energy, hydraulic, tidal, solar, and nuclear, and is sufficient reason by itself to stop any further fossil fired power stations to be built for the supply of Hong Kong's electricity.
Opponents of nuclear energy often mention other alternatives: Fusion instead of fission, solar, wind, tidal. All these are being worked on: Fusion for more than 40 years and we are no nearer to it now than we were when we first started, Solar for over 50 years and no-one has yet come up with a practical way of converting the sun's rays into large scale electricity (small scale electricity is being obtained in many countries with Israel being the most advanced and the Hong Kong Government are as remiss in this field as they are in the field of environmental pollution in that they have never really pushed any attempts at including solar power supplies into our housing estates for hot water, heat and, possibly, air conditioning). Wind needs a great deal of land and is very noisy and also does not produce any large quantities of energy, and tidal has geographical limitations which will never be overcome. So, for the foreseeable future, if we don't want to cause a global catastrophe by heating up the atmosphere, or lots of sickness by polluting the air, we are stuck with nuclear energy.
One of the reasons why I wanted to wait some time AC before making this speech was to try and get rather more information than was available in the first month after the accident.
Piecing together all the more responsible newspaper reports, the official Tass press statements, the actions taken by the Russian Authorities etc. etc. a picture emerges which is really a commentary on human failing. Chernobyl before the accident was one of the prides of the Soviet Nuclear Energy Programme because it was by far the cheapest of all the stations built in the Soviet Union. It had been pared down even to the extent that the containment building (and there was a containment building) was sufficiently strong only to contain minor accidents which were all the Soviet experts expected might happen. Automatic safety shutdown mechanisms had been left out. In other words, the main money saving was at the expense of safety. Now one has to remember that the Soviet experts have a great deal of experience, they are not stupid, they were taking calculated risks, and in the normal course of events their calculated risks would have been perfectly acceptable. What was left out, however, was unnaccountable human stupidity. No-one in their right mind could have expected that some minor functionary would decide to run an experiment in a nuclear power plant that had not been authorised by any scientific or administration committee, that was apparently an attempt at self-glorification by someone quite low on the totem-pole and which was compounded by bureaucratic irresponsibility inherent in the Communist system. No-one was ready to take responsibility or make sure laid down safety procedures were complied with. The personnel concerned was obviously lazy, uneducated and completely
unreliable.
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