• In the next 50 years – as world population expands to 9, 000, 000, 000 – global energy consumption will double.

• Stabilising the accumulation of atmospheric greenhouse gases requires that worldwide emissions be cut by 50%.

• Around the world, scientists in more than 50 countries use nearly 300 research reactors to investigate nuclear technologies and to produce isotopes for medical diagnosis and cancer therapy. In the world’s oceans, nuclear reactors have powered over 400 ships without harm to crews or the environment.

• A single mining accident killing scores of people may occur with little note, even while causing more fatalities in a day than have occurred in the full history of nuclear power.

• The International Nuclear Event Scale (INES), developed by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), is used to communicate the severity of nuclear accidents on a scale of 0 to 7.

• The Chernobyl disaster in 1986 at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant in the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic (now Ukraine) was the worst nuclear accident in history and is the only event to receive an INES score of 7.

• The World Health Organisaton (WHO) estimates that such pollution causes nearly three million deaths each year. Medical scientists predict that the fossil fuel mortality rate will triple by the year 2025. These devastating health effects – which equate to 600 “pollution Chernobyls” each day in the near future – overwhelm even the most distorted myths about nuclear energy.

• Uranium was named after the planet Uranus, discovered only eight years earlier in 1791.

• The uranium that fuels nuclear power is found in great quantity in both earth and seawater. Uranium is 40 times more naturally abundant than silver.

• Beyond producing clean electricity, the clean energy from nuclear power could be used to distil salt water on a massive scale. “Desalination” plants would help to meet the desperate shortage of fresh water that could afflict more than half of the world`s people by 2025.

• More than 20, 000 containers of spent fuel and high-level waste have been shipped safely over a total distance exceeding 30 million kilometers.

• The first nuclear reactor was built in the USA in 1942 under the direction of Enrico Fermi. In the USSR the first reactor was commissioned 4 years later. The project was headed by Igor Kurchatov.

• The first nuclear power plant was built in Obninsk (Kaluga region) in 1954. It was equipped with uranium-graphite reactor type, called “Peaceful Atom”, with 5 MW capacity. This NPP has worked accident-free for 50 years.

• Every living creature on Earth receives in an average 300 – 500 mrem a year. For instance, an everyday 3-hour watching TV gives 0.5 mrem, and dentist X-ray examination – 3000 mrem.

• Radioactive phenomenon was discovered by Antuan Becquerel in 1898. At first it was thought that the discovered radiation is emitted by an atom. But only later it became known that their source is a nucleus.

• Pierre and Marie Curie contributed significantly to the development of knowledge in radioactivity. In 1903 they were awarded the Nobel Prize.

• In 1932 James Chedvik, a physicist, discovered a neutron, which brought about the beginning of a new nuclear era in the history of mankind. He became a Nobel Prize Winner too.