Plant safety—another view

摘要

We're here to talk about death, aren't we? We should all think of death every day. It is the great disciplining factor in our lives. We should just remember our own death is imminent and we should if possible avoid killing other people. It is a serious matter. In this context I thought it was right to go to Chernobyl. I have been there and I felt the meaning of the place very strongly, as anybody would, but I came away rather more cheerful about the human enterprise than when I went in. I want to say a bit about what went wrong at Chernobyl and whether it's kind of endemic. I want to talk a bit about pollution too. We should not forget that we have now moved from a crude sort of pollution, the nineteenth-century sort, to new, sophisticated ones which are alleged to frighten the public more, because modern pollution, radiation etc., is ubiquitous, it's everywhere. It's insidious - it kills you 30 years later. It's invisible, so you can't get a good mental handle on it.