Nuclear Fission Quotes

Of all the failed technologies that litter the onward march of science - steam carriages, zeppelins, armoured trains - none has been so catastrophic to prosperity as the last century's attempt to generate electricity from nuclear fission. ~ James Buchan

Other paths would include making nuclear fission cheap enough and safe enough that people broadly embrace it, so that could be scaled up. ~ Bill Gates

We can and should complain about certain horrors of the modern world, but when it comes to the treatment of mental illness, the advances made in the last hundred years have been far more significant than the space program, nuclear fission, or even The Wire, for so many fortunate people. ~ Rob Delaney

Nearly all of our existing power sources are generators which use a heat cycle. This includes our coal, oil, and gas fired utilities, our automobiles, trucks, and trains, and even our nuclear fission utility power plants. ~ Wilson Greatbatch

Mark Spitz had met plenty of the divine-retribution folks over the months. This was their moment; they were umbrella salesmen standing outside a subway entrance in a downpour. The human race deserved the plague, we brought it on ourselves for poisoning the planet, for the Death of God, the calculated brutalities of the global economic system, for driving primordial species to extinction: the entire collapse of values as evidenced by everything from nuclear fission to reality television to alternate side of the street parking. Mark Spitz could only endure these harangues for a minute or two before he split. It was boring.The plague was the plague. You were wearing galoshes, or you weren't. ~ Colson Whitehead

Science began with a gadget and a trick. The gadget was the wheel; the trick was fire. We have come a long way from the two-wheel cart to the round-the-world transport plane, or from the sparking flint to man-made nuclear fission. Yet I wonder whether the inhabitants of Hiroshima were more aware of the evolution of science than ancient man facing an on-storming battle chariot.
It isn't physics that will make this a better life, nor chemistry, nor sociology. Physics may be used to atom-bomb a nation and chemistry may be used to poison a city and sociology has been used to drive people and classes against classes. Science is only an instrument, no more than a stick or fire or water that can be used to lean on or light or refresh, and also can be used to flail or burn or drown. Knowledge without morals is a beast on the loose. ~ Dagobert D. Runes

Some search for the North Pole. Others seek to split the atom. They are both perilous journeys. When it comes to the former, it is up to the men and women involved to consider risking their lives. I throw up my hands and leave them to it. However, when it comes to the latter, these nuclear adventurers risk the future of mankind, and I, for one, fear for us all. ~ Aaron Edelstein 18681939 The 1933 Chancellor S Lecture University Of Vienna

There is more He-3 energy on the Moon than we have ever had in the form of fossil fuels on Earth. All we have to do is to go there and get it. ~ Wilson Greatbatch

You know, sometimes I don't understand what's wrong with us. This is just about the most creative and imaginative country on earth - and yet sometimes we just don't seem to have the gumption to exploit our intellectual property. We split the atom, and now we have to get French or Korean scientists to help us build nuclear power stations. We perfected the finest cars on earth - and now Rolls-Royce is in the hands of the Germans. Whatever we invent, from the jet engine to the internet, we find that someone else carts it off and makes a killing from it elsewhere. ~ Boris Johnson

I must furnish those, who would protect or save life, with an energy source, which produces energy so cheaply that nuclear fission will not only be uneconomical, but ridiculous. This is the task I have set myself in what little life I have left. ~ Viktor Schauberger

It's funny. I thought she'd live through anything."
Charlie said, "Me too. I figured even if there was a nuclear war, it would still leave radioactive cockroaches and your mum. ~ Neil Gaiman

And there are other dangers potentially more dangerous than even nuclear war. There is AIDS. There is terrorism. There are drugs and more to the point the darkness of our time that makes people seek escape in drugs. There is the slow poisoning of what we call "the environment" of all things as if with that absurdly antiseptic phrase we can conceal from ourselves that what we are really poisoning is home, is here, is us. ~ Frederick Buechner

The Iraqi regime ... possesses and produces chemical and biological weapons. It is seeking nuclear weapons. We know that the regime has produced thousands of tons of chemical agents, including mustard gas, sarin nerve gas, VX nerve gas. ~ George W. Bush

So while there is no evidence at all that Iran has any significant quantity of nuclear material or any nuclear weapons, Iran is a much more difficult nuclear issue to resolve for the United States. ~ Joseph Cirincione

An act of unilateral nuclear disarmament by a European power would have a much more lasting impact than all the sanctions under consideration. Sanctions, as we know from the example of Iraq, always affect the least powerful citizens the most. ~ Tariq Ali

The only thing that really scales up apart from nuclear is solar power from other people's deserts. ~ David J. C. MacKay

All mankind is now learning that these nuclear weapons can only serve to destroy, never become beneficial. ~ Alva Myrdal

Galapagos': Vonnegut Explores Big-Brain Theory
October 23, 1985, Elizabeth Mehren

The big trouble, in Kurt Vonnegut's view, is our big brains.

'Our brains are much too large,' Vonnegut said. 'We are much too busy. Our brains have proved to be terribly destructive.'

Big brains, Vonnegut said, invent nuclear weapons. Big brains terrify the planet into worrying about when those weapons will be used. Big brains are restless. Big brains demand constant amusement. ~ Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

A nuclear armed Iran makes the world less safe, less stable, less secure. ~ John Barrasso

She stared at me. "Fly, ;ole, in an airplane, which you were warned never to do lest Zeus strike you out of the sky, AND carrying a weapon that has more destructive power than a nuclear bomb?"
"Yeah," I said. "Pretty much exactly like that. ~ Rick Riordan

President Nixon in his inaugural address indicated that he wanted an era of negotiation. Our reasoning was that whatever our ideological differences, whatever our geopolitical differences, we were condemned to coexistence by nuclear weapons. ~ Henry A. Kissinger

NEGRO :; Member of a subgroup of the human race who hails, or whose ancestors hailed, from a chunk of land nicknamed not by its residents Africa. Superior to the Caucasian in that negroes did not invent nuclear weapons, the automobile, Christianity, nerve gas, the concentration camp, military epidemics, or the megalopolis. ~ John Brunner

American universities are organized on the principle of the nuclear rather than the extended family. Graduate students are grimly trained to be technicians rather than connoisseurs. The old German style of universal scholarship has gone. ~ Camille Paglia

One of our gravest concerns is the entry of a nuclear device or materials into the U.S. ~ Charles E. Allen

When you look at the number of nuclear power plants in China and India, we can't afford not to pursue similar alternative energy sources. If we do not, it would do immense harm to the manufacturing industry in the Midwest. ~ Bob Latta

Last night, I went to a birthday party, and this girl brought a cake and a cheesecake. And the other girls that lived in the apartment, I swear to God, all night long: 'You're taking that cake with you when you go. That cake's not staying in this house.' Like it's this evil, Hope Diamond, nuclear, horrifying cursed thing. ~ Janeane Garofalo

Nuclear weaponry, of course, would be the be-all, end-all of just too many people in too many parts of our planet. ~ Sarah Palin

The trick in nuclear strategy is to maintain stability by balancing potentials and thus to discourage events from converting the hypothetical to the actual. ~ Mark Helprin

I know how easy it is to sound like a corny version of Noam Chomsky when talking about something like this, but in a country where millions of dollars are spent on nuclear weapons, corporate welfare, and many ridiculous things, doesn't it just make sense to take care of people first? As soon as we can make the South Bronx, Compton, Taos, and Astoria look like Beverly Hills I'll have no problem watching a guy orbit Mars. ~ Dito Montiel

The child affixes one of her little pictures to my refrigerator.
She asks, Can you detect the radiation?

There is a house, one tree, and grass in dark slashes. A sun
shining. Beneath, in her child letters, she has written Chernobyl.

At kindergarten they must be having nuclear energy week.

One could look at the picture and say everything is in order.
No, I say, I cannot see the radiation.

The radiation poison, she says, sits
inside the apple and the apple looks pretty. Then singsongs,

Bury the apple and bury the shovel that buried the apple
and put the apple-burier person in a closet forever.

We are both thinking Then bury the burier.
Both thinking of her picture with no people.

The poison sits inside the people and the people
still look pretty, she says. ~ Darcie Dennigan

It is the Far Right today that establishes the terms of the nuclear debate. And in this context, in a room ringing with hysterical pleas on behalf of Reagan's eerie laser-beam technology, the MacBundys of the world seem eminently, refreshingly sane. ~ David Talbot

In the eighteenth century it was often convenient to regard man as a clockwork automaton. In the nineteenth century, with Newtonian physics pretty well assimilated and a lot of work in thermodynamics going on, man was looked on as a heat engine, about 40 per cent efficient. Now in the twentieth century, with nuclear and subatomic physics a going thing, man had become something which absorbs X-rays, gamma rays and neutrons. ~ Thomas Pynchon

Donald Trump will make sure that any agreement with Iran meets the original goals of the U.N and our allies: a non-nuclear Iran. ~ Rudy Giuliani

Secrecy is the keystone to all tyranny. Not force, but secrecy and censorship. When any government or church for that matter, undertakes to say to its subjects, "This you may not read, this you must not know," the end result is tyranny and oppression, no matter how holy the motives. Mighty little force is needed to control a man who has been hoodwinked in this fashion; contrariwise, no amount of force can control a free man, whose mind is free. No, not the rack nor the atomic bomb, not anything. You can't conquer a free man; the most you can do is kill him. ~ Robert A. Heinlein

Irresponsible Artifical Intelligence (IAI) is likely to be a more dangerous threat to the human race than nuclear arms. ~ Sukant Ratnakar

The real threat to U.S. military power is nuclear proliferation, because if every little country has nuclear weapons it becomes very tricky for the United States to engage in military action. ~ Immanuel Wallerstein

My greatest fear is the Iranians acquire a nuclear weapon and give it to a terrorist organization. And there is a real threat of them doing that. ~ John McCain

I thought to myself, what is everyone's worst fear? Nuclear terrorism in America. ~ Nelson DeMille

Annamaria insists that mere hours earlier, I saved entire cities, sparing many hundreds of thousands from nuclear terrorism. Even if that is most likely true, I feel as though, in the process, I have forfeited a piece of my soul. ~ Dean Koontz

An example of perfection in nature is the cockroach. It was living six million years before us and it may outlast us by that long. The brain of a cockroach is a splendid little engine. It doesn't evolve and it doesn't need to. The human brain is a disaster from the point of view of perfection
great intellectual power combined with primitive emotional reactions. Human beings today are living with terrible risks of their own creation
nuclear weapons, the exploitation of natural resources, the great disparity between the wealthy and the poor. Our brains will probably bring us to destruction, but we also have the possibility of growth, evolution. I prefer being a human. We shouldn't always look for perfection, in nature or our lives. ~ Rita Levi-Montalcini

The transition between our current Type 0 civilization and a future Type I civilization is perhaps the greatest transition in history. It will determine whether we will continue to thrive and flourish, or perish due to our own folly. This transition is extremely dangerous because we still have all the barbaric savagery that typified our painful rise from the swamp. Peel back the veneer of civilization, and we still see the forces of fundamentalism, sectarianism, racism, intolerance, etc., at work. Human nature has not changed much in the past 100,000 years, except now we have nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons to settle old scores. ~ Michio Kaku

Family and work. Family and work. I can let them be at war, with guilt as their nuclear weapon and mutually assured destruction as their aim, or I can let them nourish each other. ~ Ellen Gilchrist

When God speaks, when the Word speaks, energy is translated into matter. What is atomic fission? It is matter translated back into energy - poof! it disappears. Creation began with energy. In the beginning was the Word. The Word was with God. The Word was God. ~ J. Vernon McGee

unlike, say, the sun, or the rainbow, or earthquakes, the fascinating world of the very small never came to the notice of primitive peoples. if you think about this for a minute, it's not really surprising.. they had no way of even knowing it was there, and so of course they didn't invent any myths to explain it. it wasn't until the microscope was invented in the sixteenth century that people discovered that ponds and lakes, soil and dust, even our body, teem with tiny living creatures, too small to see, yet too complicated and, in their own way, beautiful, or perhaps frightening, depending on how you think about them.

the whole world is made of incredibly tiny things, much too small to be visible to the naked eye - and yet none of the myths or so-called holy books that some people, even now, think were given to us by an all knowing god, mentions them at all. in fact, when you look at those myths and stories, you can see that they don't contain any of the knowledge that science has patiently worked out. they don't tell us how big or how old the universe is; they don't tell us how to treat cancer; they don't explain gravity or the internal combustion engine; they don't tell us about germs, or nuclear fusion, or electricity, or anaesthetics. in fact, unsurprisingly, the stories in holy books don't contain any more information about the world than was known to the primitive people who first started telling them. if these 'holly books' really were written, or dictated, ~ Richard Dawkins

The Song of Songs, the book of Ruth, and the cycle of stories associated with King David demonstrate that biblical perspectives on sexual desire and family ties remain much more complicated than is often thought. The appropriate expression of desire is not limited to marriage between a man and a woman, but can include the love of a son of a king for his charismatic ally, the love of rabbis and theologians for God, their "husband," and the love of a faithful Moabite for her Israelite mother-in-law. The nuclear family is also not idealized: Naomi, Ruth, and Obed are a family, bound together by their common love for one another, and, in the Song of Songs, the woman's mother supports her daughter's premarital encounters over the objections of her sons, who seek to control their sister's sexuality and are overruled. King David never even bothers to pursue marriage as commonly envisioned today. His ~ Jennifer Wright Knust

It's very important to make nuclear deals but you have to make them from strength, not from weakness. ~ Donald Trump

Nuclear is not only emissions-free, but renewing our commitment to nuclear power will create countless jobs at a time when our nation endures nearly double-digit unemployment. ~ Fred Upton

Israel is not just any small country. It is the only small country - the only country, period - whose neighbors publicly declare its very existence an affront to law, morality and religion and make its extinction an explicit , paramount national goal. Iran, Libya, and Iraq conduct foreign policies designed for the killing of Israelis and the destruction of their state. They choose their allies (Hamas, Hezbollah) and develop their weapons (suicide bombs, poison gas, anthrax, nuclear missiles) accordingly. Countries as far away as Malaysia will not allow a representative of Israel on their soil or even permit the showing of 'Schindler's List' lest it engender sympathy for Zion. ~ Charles Krauthammer