Nuclear Energy: A Professional Assessment: Watt Committee: report number 13 PDF

Foreword

At a number of meetings of the Watt Committee Executive, I mentioned my embarrassment at being asked repeatedly by all sorts of people, “What does The Watt Committee on Energy think about nuclear energy?”

At the Executive meeting on 20 October 1981, Mr G.K.C. Pardoe, our Deputy Chairman, suggested an answer: we should form a working party to produce a summary of the position, all the way from the uranium mine to the disposal of nuclear waste. It would be as professional and objective as the time available permitted. It would deal with the question from the British standpoint—a similar text produced by the Americans or the French might be very different—and would stress facts, rather than opinions, leaving it to the reader to draw his or her own conclusions.

Not for the first time, the member making the bright suggestion was asked to be chairman of the working party! Mr Pardoe bravely accepted the challenge. He has doubtless regretted it on many occasions, hundreds of hours of his time, and that of his team, having been required. We are deeply grateful to them for this superb example of voluntary work, rewarded, I hope, by the interest shown by readers.

Mr Pardoe asked me a few weeks ago to write a Foreword. I agreed, if only because it would give me the chance of saying what I have now said. Geoffrey also asked me to stress that this project was intended to arrive at a clarification (it is for me!), not an encyclopaedia. It is, however, a meaty document, and those who cannot see their way to read it all have thoughtfully been supplied with a summary (pages 59–64).

This report does not make the claim that was made by a French encyclopaedia that I found in a Paris bookshop, which, in about as many words as in the present Report, stated what could safely be taught to children from Religion through Physics, Meteorology and the Seven Wonders of the World to maps and stamps. Three-quarters of page 21 of that 1809 leather-bound volume says what is known about Metals. Freely translated, it reads:

Question: How many metals are there?

Answer: There are seven: gold, silver, copper, tin, lead, iron and mercury. The last-named is nonmalleable, and should perhaps be replaced by platinum, which is a sort of white gold recently discovered by the Spaniards in America.

Had he seen our Report, the professor who wrote that book would have had great difficulty in keeping his total down to seven metals, though he could of course have started by ruling out isotopes!

To the reader 174 years hence our effort may present an equally naive statement—but, in this case as in that, one that should probably prove helpful in the state of knowledge at the time.

Author: Watt Committee on Energy Publications