How many science books have you read that can't be put down? James Mahaffey has achieved this unusual feat through almost all of Atomic Awakening: A New Look at the History and Future of Nuclear Power (Pegasus Books/W.W. Norton & Co., NY, 2009 ISBN 978-1-60598-040-9).
Almost all, but not quite.
Mahaffey summarizes the history of nuclear science with a quick pace and wry humor, from Henry Becquerel’s discovery of radiation; the tragic deaths of early researchers Pierre and Marie Curie; the growth of the field of nuclear science in tandem with quantum mechanics; then through the Manhattan Project to build the first nuclear weapon; and on to nuclear reactors as an energy source in the decades following World War II.
Shrugging off Nuclear Waste
But concluding his book in a surprisingly brief section, he seems to shrug off the issue of nuclear waste disposal. He doesn’t treat the issue until page 304 of a 333-page book, where he says the issue is “not taken lightly.” But then he also says in part: – “…we had figured out how to dispose of the waste, the remaining environmental issue. . .”
He’s likely to get a strong argument on that point.
In one telling sentence, Mahaffey offers both a pointed comment on the US outlook toward nuclear power, and a display of the chip on his shoulder: “For some reason, the smoke from a coal plant, which is now a necessary component of our electrical power consumption rate, causing cancer, global warming and forest-destroying acid rain, is easier to forgive than fission products stored miles underground.”
If that statement of bias isn’t clear enough, he adds: “The anti-nuclear forces are clever at getting what they want.”
That insight follows his descriptions of the nuclear accidents at Three-Mile Island in Pennsylvania in 1979; the Chernobyl disaster in Russia in 1986; the fire at Windscale in Britain in 1957; and a harrowing, minute-by-minute chronicle of the of the SL-1 accident in Idaho in 1961, killing three workers.
The Chernobyl explosion, where 55 people died was “due to neglect and poor management as much as egregious structural flaws,” Mahaffey says. He even reports that the radioactive fallout from Chernobyl was quickly measured by instruments at a nuclear reactor in Sweden.
The Three-Mile Island core meltdown, Mahaffey says, was due to crew errors: “. . .if the operating staff had accidentally locked itself out of the control room, the TMI accident would have never happened.”
Wherever the fault lies, Three Mile Island experienced another incident on Nov. 21, 2009. Because of a radiation leakage, 150 workers were evacuated and 20 people were exposed to radiation.
Nuclear Power in France
In exploring the future of nuclear power, Mahaffey somehow does not consider the case of France, where 75 percent of that nation’s electricity is produced by a system of 58 nuclear reactors. The unofficial but widely-accepted French policy outlook on nuclear energy is summed up this way: “No coal, no oil, no choice.”
France is a leading exporter of electrical power in Europe. Yet France has had its own difficulties in dealing with its citizens over sites for nuclear waste storage. And the power agency Electricité de France (EDF), which runs those 58 nuclear reactors, has found itself in hot water over charges of dumping some of its nuclear waste in Siberia.
Mahaffey has extensive credentials in the field of nuclear energy. He has been a senior research scientist at the Georgia Tech Research Institute for 25 years, and his background includes service with the Defense Nuclear Agency. Yet even he says: “What amazes me about the early decades of nuclear power research is that so few people were killed.”
Mahaffey is an unabashed advocate for nuclear power. If this is the best case he can make for the future, he would have been better off sticking to his highly-readable treatment of history. With friends like these, nuclear power hardly needs the enemies that Mahaffey so openly disdains.
Mike Perricone - For nearly a decade, I served as Senior Editor and science writer in the Office of Public Affairs at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory ...
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