Killing Our Own

Killing Our Own
Author: Harvey Wasserman
Publisher: Delacorte Press
Total Pages: 368
Release: 1982
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 9780385285377

Provides a detailed investigation of various facets of America's involvement with nuclear power--including both wartime and peacetime applications--and exposes the dangers of and potential disasters in the nuclear industry

The Story

The Story
Author: Judith Miller
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Total Pages: 400
Release: 2016-04-19
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1476716021

An investigative reporter describes her youth and career, sharing insight into the controversial reporting style that has rendered her the longest jailed correspondent for protecting her sources.

Savage Dreams

Savage Dreams
Author: Rebecca Solnit
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Total Pages: 439
Release: 2014-06-06
Genre: Nature
ISBN: 052095792X

"A beautiful, absorbing, tragic book."—Larry McMurtry In 1851, a war began in what would become Yosemite National Park, a war against the indigenous inhabitants. A century later–in 1951–and a hundred and fifty miles away, another war began when the U.S. government started setting off nuclear bombs at the Nevada Test Site. It was called a nuclear testing program, but functioned as a war against the land and people of the Great Basin. In this foundational book of landscape theory and environmental thinking, Rebecca Solnit explores our national Eden and Armageddon and offers a pathbreaking history of the west, focusing on the relationship between culture and its implementation as politics. In a new preface, she considers the continuities and changes of these invisible wars in the context of our current climate change crisis, and reveals how the long arm of these histories continue to inspire her writing and hope.

Reparative Environmental Justice in a World of Wounds

Reparative Environmental Justice in a World of Wounds
Author: Ben Almassi
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Total Pages: 187
Release: 2020-11-24
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 1498592074

“One of the penalties of an ecological education,” wrote Aldo Leopold,” is that one lives alone in a world of wounds.” Ideally we would not do each other or the rest of our biotic community wrong, but we have, and still do. We need non-ideal environmental ethics for living together in this world of wounds. Ethics does not stop after wrongdoing: the aftermath of environmental harm demands ethical action. How we work to repair healthy relationality matters as much as the wounds themselves. Reparative Environmental Justice in a World of Wounds discusses the possibilities and practices of reparative environmental justice. It builds on theories of justice in political philosophy, feminist ethics, indigenous studies, and criminal justice as extended to non-ideal environmental ethics. How can reparative environmental justice provide a useful perspective on ecological restoration, human-animal entanglements, climate change, environmental racism, and traditional ecological knowledge? How can it promote just practices and policies while enabling effective opposition to business as usual? And how does reparative justice look different when we go beyond narrowly construed human conflicts to include relational repair with ecosystems, other animals, and future generations?

Mad Science

Mad Science
Author: Joseph J. Mangano
Publisher: OR Books
Total Pages: 337
Release: 2012
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 1935928856

"Will Americans once again play nuclear roulette? Just one year after the Fukushima meltdown, all 54 reactors in Japan have been closed, and may never be restarted. Germany recently closed several reactors, and will shutter them all within a decade. Italy revoked its pledge to build new reactors, keeping that nation nuclear-free. All these decisions are based on the understanding that reactors are extremely dangerous and expensive. In the U.S., the remnants of the once-overwhelmingly powerful nuclear lobby are making their last stand for "clean" nuclear energy. The sixty-year-old vision of power "too cheap to meter" (words originally uttered by a banker promoting the industry) is back. While other countries end their reliance on nuclear energy, Americans contemplate its revival, even as existing reactors, which produce a fifth of U.S. electricity, pass retirement age and are corroding. In Mad Science, Joseph Mangano strips away the near-smothering layers of distortions and outright lies that permeate the massive propaganda campaigns on behalf of nuclear energy. He explores the history of the industry, with its origins in the Manhattan Project, through its heightening promotion during the Cold War and its entwinement with nuclear weapons. Mad Science includes an account of nuclear accidents and meltdowns and their consequences, from Chernobyl to Santa Susana and beyond; as well as a point-by-point refutation of pro-nuke arguments. Atomic energy is unsafe - it deals with staggeringly poisonous substances at every stage of its creation - un-economical in the extreme and impractical"--Publisher's description.

Three Mile Island

Three Mile Island
Author: Grace Halden
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 253
Release: 2017-06-27
Genre: History
ISBN: 1317419936

Three Mile Island explains the far-reaching consequences of the partial meltdown of Pennsylvania’s Three Mile Island power plant on March 28, 1979. Though the disaster was ultimately contained, the fears it triggered had an immediate and lasting impact on public attitudes towards nuclear energy in the United States. In this volume, Grace Halden contextualizes the events at Three Mile Island and the ensuing media coverage, offering a gripping portrait of a nation coming to terms with technological advances that inspired both awe and terror. Including a selection of key primary documents, this book offers a fascinating resource for students of the history of science, technology, the environment, and Cold War culture.

Radiation

Radiation
Author: Ilya Obodovskiy
Publisher: Elsevier
Total Pages: 722
Release: 2019-03-09
Genre: Science
ISBN: 0444639861

The author is ready to assert that practically none of the readers of this book will ever happen to deal with large doses of radiation. But the author, without a shadow of a doubt, claims that any readers of this book, regardless of gender, age, financial situation, type of professional activity, and habits, are actually exposed to low doses of radiation throughout their life. This book is devoted to the effect of small doses on the body. To understand the basic effects of radiation on humans, the book contains the necessary information from an atomic, molecular and nuclear physics, as well as from biochemistry and biology. Special attention is paid to the issues that are either not considered or discussed very briefly in existing literature. Examples include the ionization of inner atomic shells that play an essential role in radiological processes, and the questions of transformation of the energy of ionizing radiation in matter. The benefits of ionizing radiation to mankind is reflected in a wide range of radiation technologies used in science, industry, agriculture, culture, art, forensics, and, what is the most important application, medicine. Radiation: Fundamentals, Applications, Risks and Safety provides information on the use of radiation in modern life, its usefulness and indispensability. Experiments on the effects of small doses on bacteria, fungi, algae, insects, plants and animals are described. Human medical experiments are inhuman and ethically flawed. However, during the familiarity of mankind with ionizing radiation, a large number of population groups were subject to accumulation, exposed to radiation at doses of small but exceeding the natural background radiation. This book analyzes existing, real-life radiation results from survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Chernobyl and Fukushima, and examines studies of radiation effect on patients, radiologists, crews of long-distant flights and astronauts, on miners of uranium copies, on workers of nuclear industry and on militaries, exposed to ionizing radiation on a professional basis, and on the population of the various countries receiving environmental exposure. The author hopes that this book can mitigate the impact of radiation phobia, which prevails in the public consciousness over the last half century. - Explores the science of radiation and the effects of radiation technologies and biological processes - Analyzes the elementary processes of ionization and excitation - Summarizes information about inner shells ionization and its impact on matter and biological structures - Discusses quantum concepts in biology and clarifies the importance of epigenetics in radiological processes - Includes case studies focusing on humans irradiated by low doses of radiation and its effects

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.