Wealth & Money Quote by David R. Brower

Brower doesn’t argue against nuclear power as a technology so much as against the social order it drags in behind it. “Once we open the door” frames the choice as irreversible: not a policy tweak, but a threshold moment after which the ordinary safeguards of democratic life can’t quite close again. The phrase “plutonium economy” is doing heavy lifting. It’s not about electrons on the grid; it’s about an entire infrastructure of mining, reprocessing, transport, guarding, and secrecy built around a material that is uniquely toxic, militarily useful, and long-lived. In that single coinage, Brower compresses a critique of how energy systems become governance systems.

The line’s emotional voltage comes from the shift into “absolutely terrible, horrifying risks.” He’s refusing the technocrat’s vocabulary of “acceptable” risk, the bureaucratic language that turns catastrophe into probability. Brower’s intent is to make risk feel moral, not statistical.

Then there’s the deliberately vague menace of “these people.” It’s a fingerprint of the postwar nuclear era: the engineers who see dissent as ignorance, the contractors who profit from complexity, the security state that requires classified decisions, and the proliferators who exploit gaps. Brower isn’t claiming everyone involved is evil; he’s warning that plutonium selects for institutions that thrive on control, opacity, and force.

Historically, this sits in the long 1970s-90s environmental debate over breeder reactors and reprocessing, when plutonium wasn’t an abstraction but a policy project. Brower’s subtext: you can’t build a “clean” plutonium future in a messy human world, and calling it progress is how the danger gets normalized.