Atomic power safety: a common sense approach

All sources of fuel are needed to supply the increasing power needs of a growing population. Atomic fuel competes economically with fossil fuels under most conditions and eliminates undesirable environmental pollution by stack effluents. Both fossil- and atomic-fueled plants have waste hot water which necessitates controls to prevent changes in the ecology. The 25-year record of health and safety of atomic energy programs in the United States should be comforting to the public. Radiation exposures from commercial power reactors have been a very small fraction of permissible limits, and the Atomic Energy Commission has recently further restricted releases from such reactors so that the average exposure to the public will be only about 1% of that from the natural background.