Download Fallout Disasters Lies and the Legacy of the Nuclear Age Fred Pearce 9780807073506 Books

Product details Paperback 264 pages Publisher Beacon Press; Reprint edition (March 26, 2019) Language English ISBN-10 0807073504

Fallout Disasters Lies and the Legacy of the Nuclear Age Fred Pearce 9780807073506 Books Reviews

• My father used to give Sunday sermons about why the world needs The Kingdom of God to save it, and the highlight was nuclear waste. You can argue for man-made solutions to lots of problems, but nuclear waste is the trump card. You just can't get rid of the stuff. And it's the deadliest poison there is. Which is why my sister got into an argument with her teacher and avoided an F by addressing all the reasons why nuclear waste just can't be gotten rid of. So it was with great interest that I read this book and found a surprisingly entertaining history of radioactive fallout.
  
  You'll find a lot interesting stuff here, from radioactive tourism to natural preserves on the exclusion zones of fallout, to atom bombs and nuclear testing to leaking stockpiles around the world. There's a nicely balanced style of reporting here that shows both the exaggerations of people with radiophobia as well as the gung-ho attitudes of people who think that nuclear is great, despite it's insanely high price and horrific safety record.
  
  This is a light and breezy (ha!) read at 216 pages so you'll polish it off quick, but if you are interested in a brief history of the atomic age this is your book. Highly recommended to history buffs who are interested in the subject but don't want to read something too technical or a scare-mongering or marketing book.
• FALLOUT DISASTERS, LIES, AND THE LEGACY OF THE NUCLEAR AGE is a highly readable account of the damage inflicted on humans by nuclear explosions and disasters, starting with the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima, and continuing through the year 2017. It offers a short but complete history of the Atomic Age.
  
  It’s filled with surprising-to-me facts. For example, everyone on the planet received nuclear fallout from the above-ground nuclear tests conducted from 1954-1963--the average human received 0.15 millisieverts (a tiny dose) in 1963 alone. Or, as another example, the best way to dispose of nuclear waste is to reprocess it to extract the plutonium--something that was routinely done when plutonium was used to produce atomic weapons, but that is NOT usually done now that plutonium is used to generate power.
  
  This book is a good choice for anyone who wants to get quickly up to speed on the past, present, and future of nuclear energy and nuclear weapons.
• Radiation is invisible. You can't see, hear, or feel it. Too much of certain kinds will kill you. You have to rely on experts to tell you when radiation is dangerous. And the experts disagree. That is the repeated theme of this book.
  
  The first few chapters were both horrific and boring, because they're about early nuclear disasters in the Soviet Union, where little was known about radiation and news was covered up. Terrible things happened but they were far away, a long time ago. The last chapters are about nuclear waste, and equally horrific and boring. Terrible things could happen in the future, perhaps in thousands of years. Experts just don't know.
  
  In the middle were the good chapters. Rocky Flats is just a few miles from my house in Colorado, and I paid attention to the stories about plutonium fires. The fires were described in detail, down to the flammable plastic boxes and gloves used to make the bomb pits. Then the chapter about Windscale in the UK was equally detailed, explaining exactly what can go wrong in a nuclear power plant. Chernobyl and Fukushima were also presented clearly.
  
  The author proved his case that no expert can say exactly how dangerous any particular radiation is. He presents many cases of people and animals living long lives in nuclear zones. He presents other cases of nuclear disasters causing widespread thyroid cancer. We just don't know what is safe.
• If you are curious about atomic weapons and atomic power, if you wonder what is acceptable exposure to radiation, if you wondered what happened at 3 mile island, Chernobyl, and Fukushima, if the question what to do about nuclear waste is something you have wondered about and most importantly if your attention span is compatible to getting your “in-depth news” from Twitter, this is the book for you.
  This is not to take away anything from this book it is just the subject matter is so broad and so vast that to attempt to cover it in 200 pages is laughable. You get zero details about anything listed above. But he does a good job citing sources to enhance what is barely touched upon it the book.
• I found Fallout completely by chance and was glad that I did. The topic is something I have been intrigued about and a little freaked out by for some time. The book was very easy to read and with incredibly frightening and fascinating content. It really did a great job of painting the horrific picture of the nuclear age from warfare to civilian usage to clean-up. The depth of the research and quality of writing was perfect and easy for a beginner of this subject to understand. I devoured this book and really enjoyed it.
• While there are certainly some interesting facts contained within the book, at 216 pages and with 27 chapters (if you include introduction and conclusion) then the average chapter is only 8 pages. Fallout therefore feels more like a stitched-together collection of newspaper articles than long narrative verity. The idea of low carbon baseload electricity has always appealed to me, but an industry fraught with secrecy, incompetence, long-term waste issues and 200-year decommissioning horizons just doesn't seem worth it anymore, with both Germany and France independently coming to the same conclusion.
• This book looks at several nuclear catastrophes and the hype around them. Not everything is as the government or big business would want you to believe.