The War against the Atom/Crisis Contained/Nukespeak/The Cult of the Atom/Nuclear Power: Both Sides:
Lanouette, William J
Books: NUCLEAR POWER & POLEMIC THE WAR AGAINST THE ATOM Samuel McCracken Basic Books, $18.50, 206 pp. CRISIS CONTAINED Philip L. Cantelon and Robert C.Williams Southern Illinois University...
...While the general reader will find Crisis Contained much too detailed, the TMI junkie will surely want it for his coffee table...
...this troublesome and fascinating topic...
...From here on in, all is in dispute...
...First, there are often more than two sides to the issues that surround- and confound- the nuclear debate, shades of disagreement or consensus that are lost in the rhetoric of the more strident speakers...
...As he says when it ends, however, "these then are the noncontroversial facts about nuclear energy...
...The book recounts, sometimes minute.by.minute, the department's supporting role to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, a role that included radiation.monitoring, moving more than 1,000 lead bricks, and ferrying other federal officials to and from the crisis scene...
...Norton, $4.95, 279 pp...
...As a result, he leaves the uninitiated reader more confused and uninformed than before taking up the book...
...101) that "it is plain nonsense that the people of New England have opposed the Seabrook [New Hampshire nuclear] plant...
...Although he acknowledges that the citizens of Seabrook "once voted against the plant," he fails to say that a dozen other communities in the area did likewise at their town meetings...
...Daniel Ford, of the Union of Concerned Scientists, has been one of the most persistent and articulate critics of atomic energy, and his Cult of the Atom, which is based on "the secret papers" of the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC), lays out convincingly the manner in which the secrecy employed to protect the "military atom" also kept the "civilian atom" from the kind of open, scientific criticism necessary to make it safe...
...He imputes to "the average humanist" (p...
...Two characters dominate Ford's account: Glenn Seaborg, who was AEC chairman in the critical years of atomic energy's growth, 1961.1971, and Stephen Hanauer, the recently retired safety expert who kept a "nugget file'' of mishaps that demonstrated risks associ...
...Unfortunately, such books are often loose with their facts, and McCracken's is no exception...
...THE COLT OF THE ATOM Daniel Ford Simon and Schuster, $13.95, 273 pp...
...But while it is a useful sampler of different views, it fails on two counts...
...Examples of his selective technique abound...
...The pity is that from the broad range of sources he cites, McCracken could have produced a more honest work...
...What's puzzling is that he appears to know better, for his first chapter, "Some Technical Background," is both lucid and generally accurate...
...35) that "as yet there is no body of data on operating breeders [reactors meant to produce more nuclear fuel than they consume] that would allow any hard assessment of the risks of a meltdown comparable to those made on [conventional] reactors...
...The list of words is impressive, and many details of how they were created are amusing, if sometimes macabre...
...NOKESPEAK Stephen Hilgartner, Richard C. Bell, and Rory O'Connor Sierra Club Books, $14.95, 275 pp...
...and anti.nuclear arguments dispassionately...
...or anti.nuclear arguments without ever addressing the same issues...
...Because, one is tempted to answer, like the mountain, it was there...
...And the agnostics readily admit that they find themselves confused, sometimes amused, but nonetheless fascinated by the debates that believers and non.believers engage in...
...Indeed, McCracken ends up using only the controversial facts that suit his one.sided purpose...
...Thus, the authors, who are mostly well respected authorities for their different viewpoints, sometimes spin out clearly pro...
...W.W...
...Atomic energy offers us a telling example of how political and social institutions came to terms with- or ignored- a new technology, one with great benefits and grave perils...
...last word on this troublesome and fascinating topic...
...ated with the peaceful atom...
...An obvious adaption of Orwell's "newspeak," the book recounts how euphemisms have been devised to mask atomic energy's uglier features: a nuclear war becomes an '' exchange "; an accident becomes a "normal aberration," an "incident," or an "event...
...The critics find claims by the zealots and the faithful to be in error, and struggle toward logical refutations- or alternate dogmas of their own...
...McCracken simplifies the controversial (but well documented) events surrounding nuclear activist Karen Silkwood's radioactive contamination and death, ignoring a recent and thorough book on the subject (by Richard Rashke in 1981) in favor of an early and biased one (by Jacque Srouji in 1977), then praises the earlier work for "the most complete documentation of the Silkwood case generally available...
...Zealots will delight in a work by one of their own, Samuel McCracken, whose previous broadsides (Commentary, September 1977 and June 1979) are now combined and augmented in The War Against the Atom...
...58), McCracken says that recovering this waste' 'requires a massive, complex, and very expensive reprocessing plant...
...Crisis Contained is the straightforward work of the nuclear faithful, in this case two historians hired by the federal government to record "The Department of Energy at Three Mile Island...
...Such books are almost a genre these days: the apparently rational scholar leading the bemused reader through a current controversy to new levels of awareness and understanding...
...This pro.nuclear paean is explained in its subtitle: "the overwhelming case for nuclear power- and against the groups and individuals who continue to fight it...
...In a federally sponsored study by the nuclear industry, such pool.design breeders were judged safer than the so.called loop type...
...103) the notion that radiation is "evil," and "may even be the Evil One himself...
...These are but a few of the many selec., tive errors that allow McCracken to defend nuclear power and attack its critics- often with simplistic, ad hominem arguments...
...Second, there is little control by the editors that forces the authors to address the same issues with the same agreed.upon terms...
...But it was Leo Szilard, the first scientist to discover the potential for a nuclear chain reaction, who said in 1946 that the work of releasing atomic energy may be the work of the devil...
...William J. Lanouette LIKE a new religion, the advent of nuclear energy has inspired a host of participants, from zealots to agnostics...
...After all, where else could he discover that the name of the Energy Department's efforts had the code name Operation Ivory Purpose...
...But an Oak Ridge National Laboratory study, which was circulated by the nuclear industry, concluded in 1977 that any country (or terrorist group) with operating dairy, wine.making, and refinery technology could assemble a simple reprocessing plant in four to six months, and could thereafter separate enough plutonium to make at least a bomb a week: the study even included blueprints, flow.charts, and work schedules to demonstrate the relative simplicity of the operation...
...In that sense no single book -by zealots, believers, skeptics, critics, or agnostics -could give the...
...here are a few...
...But McCracken fails to point out that the controversial breeder to be built on the Clinch River in Tennessee is a loop type...
...One could argue that references to Satan don't contribute much to the debates in this area, but obviously you don't have to be a Luddite humanist to respond with that kind of language...
...For the agnostics of atomic energy, Nuclear Power: Both Sides is an attempt to weigh pro...
...By these very limitations, Nuclear Power: Both Sides, highlights one of the thorniest problems with the nuclear debate itself: the unique blends of technology and emotion, of politics and morality, of economics and public safety, that have shaped this energy source from its beginnings...
...These two operating breeders both had core.melt accidents, a fact he minimizes elsewhere...
...And he omits from his "body of data on operating breeders" here two loop.type reactors that have actually worked in the United StatesExperimental Breeder Reactor 1 in Idaho and Fermi 1 in Michigan...
...The quotes and careers of the two insiders are quite different, and worth the price of the book in themselves...
...With the fourth anniversary of the celebrated Three Mile Island accident at hand, a passel of new books about nuclear power offers something for everyone...
...And he says that the "best contemporary" design for a breeder is one that holds the radioactive core in a pool of liquid sodium coolant...
...McCracken claims (p...
...CRISIS CONTAINED Philip L. Cantelon and Robert C.Williams Southern Illinois University Press, $17.50, 213 pp...
...The skeptics can't quite bring themselves to accept this technology into their hearts, but they can't stop trying to understand its strange attractions either...
...The zealots see this new technology as the answer to mankind's energy prayer...
...from the zealots to the agnostics, and those in between...
...And in the cases of the breeder and fusion- the power source of the sun and of the hydrogen bomb- there are no opposing viewpoints to the two favorable essays at all...
...In its original form, as a government document, the authors asked and answered a question that this commercial edition omits:'' Why a history of the Department of Energy at Three Mile Island...
...NUCLEAR POWER: BOTH SIDES Michio Kaku and Jennifer Trainer,Eds...
...He says (p...
...The faithful support this scientific quest despite its mysteries- or, maybe, be.cause of them...
...The skeptics of nuclear power are represented here by the authors of Nuke.speak, a well.researched account of how the atom's technical jargon has become our own...
...In writing about the potential for nuclear weapons to be made from the plutonium that is produced in conventional plants and breeders (p...
...This is the conventional wisdom of the nuclear industry...
...Ford documents the many (often amusing) ways that scientific data were manipulated in order to ignore or diminish serious safety problems...
Vol. 110 • May 1983 • No. 9
