ABSTRACT
In Energy or Extinction one of us remarked that a nuclear reactor is no more likely to explode than a bar of chocolate. The point has been further developed by Lord Rothschild in his recent Richard Dimbleby Lecture. Although nuclear physics is a comparatively new branch of science, it is in many ways simpler than the older sciences of chemistry and biology. Unlike chemistry, where very many combinations of substances are explosive, there is only one basic way to produce a nuclear explosion, a way that is most carefully avoided by the designers of nuclear reactors. This is why one can be clear that reactors cannot explode, just as one can be clear that an unaided human cannot jump a thousand feet up into the air. If the chemical industry had traditionally employed a fraction of the care which the nuclear industry has taken from its beginning, the cause of the Flixborough disaster would not have seemed so amazing.
