"All I know about thermal pollution is that if we continue our present rate of growth in electrical energy consumption it will simply take, by the year 2000, all our freshwater streams to cool the generators and reactors."

Rating:

  rate this quote
Topic: none  help us select a topic for this quote

More quotes from: David R. Brower

• "A great deal of pressure was then built up to remove me from the club ..."
• "Apollo 13, as you may remember, gave us a reactor that is bubbling away right ..."
• "At that time a senator who was on the Joint Committee of Atomic Energy said ..."
• "Besides, the club has changed and is now into many of the things that its ..."
• "Bring diversity back to agriculture. That's what made it work in the first place. "
• "Do you know what a runaway reactor can do? It can produce a radioactive cloud ..."
• "Even as recently as '69, I still had the illusion, you see, that atomic energy ..."
• "Even if you build the perfect reactor, you're still saddled with a people problem and ..."
• "For how many people do you think might yet stand on this planet before the ..."
• "I began to get a little suspicious in the mid-fifties during a long session I ..."
• "I began working with the John Muir Institute and then started helping found Friends of ..."
• "I believe that the average guy in the street will give up a great deal, ..."
• "I don't think we have very good records about what they were thinking except, as ..."
• "I sort of kept my hand in writing and went to work for the Sierra ..."
• "I was actually telling people that - by harnessing the atom - we could enter ..."
• "I was born in Berkeley, California 60 years ago and I dropped out of college ..."
• "I went in the back door and was an editor of the University of California ..."
• "I will say this, - though: If it is true that fusion will put unlimited ..."
• "Is the minor convenience of allowing the present generation the luxury of doubling its energy ..."
• "It is absolutely imperative that we protect, preserve and pass on this genetic heritage for ..."
• "It seems that every time mankind is given a lot of energy, we go out ..."

• "It's like turning the space program over to the Long Island Railroad. "
• "It's time that we all got out the pledge cards and made a pact with ..."
• "It's very hard for me to know what to say about fusion right now, inasmuch ..."
• "Once we open the door to the plutonium economy, we expose ourselves to absolutely terrible, ..."
• "Perhaps most ridiculous of all is the suggestion that we 'keep' our radioactive garbage for ..."
• "Perhaps we'll realize that each of us has not one vote but ten thousand or ..."
• "'Realistic' is a loaded word for me. Anyone who uses the word 'realistic' is all ..."
• "Some otherwise sane scientists have seriously proposed that we tuck this deadly garbage under the ..."
• "Supposedly rational spokesmen want to drop our radioactive waste on the Antarctic and let it ..."
• "The breeder reactor has all the problems we've just discussed - in spades - and ..."
• "The more we pour the big machines, the fuel, the pesticides, the herbicides, the fertilizer ..."
• "The risk presented by these lethal wastes is like no other risk, and we should ..."
• "The Sierra Club is a very good and a very powerful force for conservation and, ..."
• "The threat, I think, has best been described by the AEC itself which recently pointed ..."
• "Then we have to invent still more energy-intensive synthetics which further spoil the natural processes ..."
• "There are many different kinds of radioactive waste and each has its own half-life so, ..."
• "There is no place where we can safely store worn-out reactors or their garbage. No ..."
• "They simply don't know that much about what they're doing. There isn't enough control. There ..."
• "Understanding how DNA transmits all it knows about cancer, physics, dreaming and love will keep ..."
• "Unfortunately, however, reactors and genes don't mix very well. Radiation can cause genes to mutate ..."

• "Until four years ago, in fact, I was absolutely in love with the atom. "
• "We are at the edge of an abyss and we're close to being irrevocably lost. "
• "We don't need all those dangers. The additional energy isn't worth it. The breeder program ..."
• "We might peer into the future at the generations yet unborn and ask ourselves if ..."
• "We tried burying the waste at sea and the concrete cannisters that held it cracked ..."
• "We've got to search back to our last known safe landmark. I can't say exactly ..."
• "We've pumped waste into cavities in solid rock and found that it spread through the ..."
• "Well, as the Welshman Allen Reese puts it, 'At the edge of the abyss the ..."
• "What happens when the guy who runs the reactor gets out of bed wrong or ..."
• "What's even more unsettling is the way these people hide what they're doing from the ..."
• "When people say, 'You're not being realistic,' they're just trying to tag some thoughts that ..."
• "Yet another proposal would have us rocket the waste into the sun, but, as you're ..."
• "You would probably have taken a rather dim view of me if I had picked ..."