Nuclear Roulette

Nuclear Roulette
Author: Gar Smith
Publisher: Chelsea Green Publishing
Total Pages: 323
Release: 2012
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 160358434X

Nuclear power is not clean, cheap, or safe. With Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, and Fukushima, the nuclear industry's record of catastrophic failures now averages one major disaster every decade. After three US-designed plants exploded in Japan, many countries moved to abandon reactors for renewables. In the United States, however, powerful corporations and a compliant government still defend nuclear power-while promising billion-dollar bailouts to operators. Each new disaster demonstrates that the nuclear industry and governments lie to "avoid panic," to preserve the myth of "safe, clean" nuclear power, and to sustain government subsidies. Tokyo and Washington both covered up Fukushima's radiation risks and-when confronted with damning evidence-simply raised the levels of "acceptable" risk to match the greater levels of exposure. Nuclear Roulette dismantles the core arguments behind the nuclear-industrial complex's "Nuclear Renaissance." While some critiques are familiar-nuclear power is too costly, too dangerous, and too unstable-others are surprising: Nuclear Roulette exposes historic links to nuclear weapons, impacts on Indigenous lands and lives, and the ways in which the Nuclear Regulatory Commission too often takes its lead from industry, rewriting rules to keep failing plants in compliance. Nuclear Roulette cites NRC records showing how corporations routinely defer maintenance and lists resulting "near-misses" in the US, which average more than one per month. Nuclear Roulette chronicles the problems of aging reactors, uncovers the costly challenge of decommissioning, explores the industry's greatest seismic risks-not on California's quake-prone coast but in the Midwest and Southeast-and explains how solar flares could black out power grids, causing the world's 400-plus reactors to self-destruct. This powerful exposé concludes with a roundup of proven and potential energy solutions that can replace nuclear technology with a "Renewable Renaissance," combined with conservation programs that can cleanse the air, and cool the planet.

Critical Masses

Critical Masses
Author: Thomas Raymond Wellock
Publisher: Univ of Wisconsin Press
Total Pages: 354
Release: 1998
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780299158545

The grassroots battle against nuclear power, told by a historian who did time on both sides of the issue. CRITICAL MASSES tells how the citizens of California--from the tiny town of Wasco in the Central Valley to the vast suburbs of Los Angeles--challenged the threat of nuclear power, transformed the anti-nuclear movement, and helped change the face of U.S. politics. 21 photos.