Book Review : “The Nuclear Impact” by Frank Kreith and Catherine Wrenn

[delosharriman]

The subtitle of this book is A Case Study of the Plowshare Program to Produce Gas by Underground Nuclear Stimulation in the Rocky Mountains.

Review posted on the book-selling site Alibris, where I gave the book a score of 4/5. (I make no recommendation of any book marketplace over any other — this one gives me Amtrak points, so I tend to shop there.)

It may be that fracking for gas with atom bombs was not a good idea. The three tests which were done suggest that the costs would be higher, and the benefits smaller, than initially predicted. But this does not explain the opposition to the project which emerged. It does not explain how the public imagination was seized by such predictions as that, if the technique became widespread, tritium in drinking water in some remote areas of Colorado might reach three per cent of the permissible level — which, as with all radiation standards, was set far below the point where any ill effects could be observed.

And it is exactly this kind of thing which must be understood in order to overcome it, and must be overcome in order to break the stagnation of nuclear energy development since the 1980s. And that stagnation must be broken in order to break the deadlock between the demands of the environment and those of industrial development, which has reached the proportion of a crisis. Fission, and the undeniable advantages and benefits it brings with it, must be embraced not merely by subject-matter experts (who are carefully excluded from virtually every public discussion), but by the people at large.