Quote of the Day

[varjohaltia]

”It is easy to imagine the enemy is the nuclear reactor, but the enemy isn’t technology. I have come to the paradoxical conclusion that technology must be protected from man. In the past, the time that include the old reactors, the times that ended with Gagarin’s flight into space, the technology was created those who stood on the shoulders of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky; they were educated in the spirit of the great humanitarian ideas; in the spirit of a beautiful and correct moral sense. They had a clear political idea of the society they were trying to create; one that would be the most advanced in the world. But already in the generations that succeeded them, there were engineers who stood on their shoulders and saw only the technical side of things. But if someone is educated only in the technical ideas, they cannot create anything new, anything for which they are responsible. The operators of the reactor that night considered they were doing everything well and correctly; and they were breaking the rules for the sake of doing it better, but they had lost sight of the purpose…what they were doing it for.”

(1986) Valeri Legasov, Deputy Director, Atomic Power Institute, in regards to the Chernobyl accident.