Keynote Speech

It is a great honor to be here to talk to PATRAM ' 95. This is an area of the nuclear energy industry about which I probably know the least, but as I am from Washington, I find that I have no inhibition and do it with some relish. These are better auspices than the last time I spoke at this hotel, which was for a nuclear waste meeting. The organizers succeeded in persuading the mayor of Las Vegas to speak. Her message was: \"We don' t like you; we don't like nuclear energy; we hate Yucca Mountain; we loathe the test site; what we need is more hotels like this one.\" Clearly, in her philosophy, hotels like this one advance the human agenda more so than disposing of nuclear waste. I wonder if we couldn't put some waste in hotels like this one and then entomb them, having achieved two great social goals in one stellar action. I agree with what Mr. Rasin said this morning about \"Let us not be so pushed by public policy that we become experts at producing elegant solutions to non-problems.\" In every aspect of the nuclear industry, because of the victimization that the industry has endured for nearly 30 years, that has become a standard situation. We are often in the position of putting one more angel on the pinhead, but because we are brilliant engineers, we sharpen the pinhead first to make it somewhat more challenging. And the use alas, is very slight.