LEADING FOR THE LONG FUTURE
My late uncle, Alvin Weinberg, was a nuclear physicist who often acted as the conscience of that sector. He was fired as director of Oak Ridge National Laboratory after twenty-five years in the job because he would not stop talking about the dangers of reactor safety and nuclear waste. He also, controversially, opposed using the type of reactor fuel that produces material for weap ons.1 Then, as founder of the Institute for Energy Analysis, he initiated one of the nation's pioneering R&D units on alternative energy-he was one of the first scientists to warn about the threat
of C02 and global warming.
Alvin once confided to me his ambivalence about for-profit companies running nuclear power plants; he feared that the profit motive would mean they cut safety measures-a premonition of what contributed to the Fukushima disaster in Japan.2
Alvin was particularly troubled that the nuclear energy industry had never solved the problem of what to do with radioactive waste. He urged it to find a solution that would persist as long as the waste remained radioactive-such as an institution dedicated to guarding those stockpiles and keeping people safe from them over centuries or millennia.3
Decisions with the long horizon in mind raise questions like, Howill what we do today matter in a century, or in five hundred years? To the grandchildren of our grandchildren's grand
children?
LEADING FOR THE LONG FUTURE
My late uncle, Alvin Weinberg, was a nuclear physicist who often acted as the conscience of that sector. He was fired as director of Oak Ridge National Laboratory after twenty-five years in the job because he would not stop talking about the dangers of reactor safety and nuclear waste. He also, controversially, opposed using the type of reactor fuel that produces material for weap ons.1 Then, as founder of the Institute for Energy Analysis, he initiated one of the nation's pioneering R&D units on alternative energy-he was one of the first scientists to warn about the threat
of C02 and global warming.
Alvin once confided to me his ambivalence about for-profit companies running nuclear power plants; he feared that the profit motive would mean they cut safety measures-a premonition of what contributed to the Fukushima disaster in Japan.2
Alvin was particularly troubled that the nuclear energy industry had never solved the problem of what to do with radioactive waste. He urged it to find a solution that would persist as long as the waste remained radioactive-such as an institution dedicated to guarding those stockpiles and keeping people safe from them over centuries or millennia.3
Decisions with the long horizon in mind raise questions like, Howill what we do today matter in a century, or in five hundred years? To the grandchildren of our grandchildren's grand
children?
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