KEMM is guilty of special pleading for the nuclear physics community. (Business Report, December 22) He quite plausibly says that we should trust such nuclear folk.
But he is taking a short-term view, say over the next hundred years or so.
Readers should remember that we’re still basking in the benefits bestowed on us a hundred-and-fifty years ago by physics folk like James Clerk Maxwell.
And these benefits, which generate a lot of the technically sophisticated luxury we enjoy, may yet turn out to be ephemeral. So I differ from Dr Kemm, despite having once been severely put down in public for such heresy by a late physics luminary, Edward Teller.
Perhaps in the long run, say 50 000 years or so, the whole nuclear scheme that so marvellously terminated World War 2 will prove not to have been purely beneficial.
For the sake of preserving humanity we should take a longer and sceptical view about nuclear matters.
Paul Jackson
Table View, Cape Town