In this timely book, Gwyneth Cravens takes an
informed and clarifying look at the myths, the fears, and the truth
about nuclear energy.
With concerns about catastrophic global warming mounting, it is vital
that we examine all our energy options. Power to Save
the World describes the efforts of one determined woman,
Gwyneth Cravens, initially a skeptic about nuclear power, as she spends
nearly a decade immersing herself in the subject. She teams up with a
leading expert in risk assessment and nuclear safety who is also a
committed environmentalist to trace the path of uranium—the
source of nuclear fuel—from start to finish. As we accompany
them on visits to mines as well as to experimental reactor
laboratories, fortress-like power plants, and remote waste sites
normally off-limits to the public, we come to see that we already have
a feasible way to address the causes of global warming on a large scale.
On the nuclear tour, Cravens converses with scientists from many
disciplines, public health and counterterrorism experts, engineers, and
researchers who study both the harmful and benign effects of radiation;
she watches remote-controlled robotic manipulators unbolt a canister of
spent uranium fuel inside a “hot cell” bathed in
eerie orange light; observes the dark haze from fossil-fuel combustion
obscuring once-pristine New Mexico skies and the leaky, rusted pipes
and sooty puddles in a coal-fired plant; glimpses rainbows made by salt
dust in the deep subterranean corridors of a working nuclear waste
repository.
She refutes the major arguments against nuclear power one by one,
making clear, for example, that a stroll through Grand Central Terminal
exposes a person to more radiation than a walk of equal length through
a uranium mine; that average background radiation around Chernobyl and
in Hiroshima is lower than in Denver; that there are no
“cancer clusters” near nuclear facilities; that
terrorists could neither penetrate the security at an American nuclear
plant nor make an atomic bomb from its fuel; that nuclear waste can
be—and already is—safely stored; that wind and
solar power, while important, can meet only a fraction of the demand
for electricity; that a coal-fired plant releases more radiation than a
nuclear plant and also emits deadly toxic waste that kills thousands of
Americans a month; that in its fifty-year history American nuclear
power has not caused a single death. And she demonstrates how, time and
again, political fearmongering and misperceptions about risk have
trumped science in the dialogue about the feasibility of nuclear energy.
In the end, we see how nuclear power has been successfully and
economically harnessed here and around the globe to become the single
largest displacer of greenhouse gases, and how its overall risks and
benefits compare with those of other energy sources.. |
Power to Save the
World
The Truth About Nuclear Energy
by Gwyneth Cravens
Knopf,
2007
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a copy
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