Wealth & Money Quote by David R. Brower

“Lethal wastes” is a phrase engineered to end the conversation before it starts. Brower isn’t arguing about kilowatt hours or cost-benefit spreadsheets; he’s yanking the debate out of the technical realm and into the moral one. By calling the risk “like no other,” he frames radioactive pollution (the context here is nuclear power and its long-lived byproducts) as a category-breaker: not a typical industrial hazard that can be priced, insured, and regulated, but a contaminant whose timescale bulldozes the usual social contract.

The line’s real force comes from its pronouns and verbs. “We should not be expected to accept it” casts the public as the party being drafted into someone else’s bargain, consent assumed rather than granted. “Project it into the future” is an indictment of temporal outsourcing: profits and convenience are booked in the present, while stewardship, monitoring, and potential catastrophe are handed to people not yet born. Brower’s intent is to make that intergenerational imbalance feel not just imprudent, but indecent.

Then comes the knife twist: “a dollar killing now.” It’s a pun with teeth, fusing the idiom for huge profit with literal death. Manufacturers and utilities aren’t merely benefiting; they’re cashing in on a system that socializes risk and privatizes reward. The subtext is anti-capture and anti-complacency: the institutions asking for trust have financial incentives to minimize the danger, and the public is being told to treat that as progress. Brower’s rhetoric doesn’t beg for better management; it questions the legitimacy of the whole trade.