Reviews for Nuclear Safety

The average rating for Nuclear Safety based on 2 reviews is 4.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2013-12-20 00:00:00 John Smith The book I read to research this post was Nuclear Safety by Gianni Petrangelli which is an excellent book which I read at This book is about the safety measures in place primarily in nuclear power stations in the western world although it does contrast it with places like Chernobyl. It also looks at some of the accidents they have had like with 3 Mile Island & Sellafield. The earliest example of a nuclear reactor was built in 1942 and was basically inserting caesium rods into a mass of uranium and pushing the rods further in to increase power and withdrawing them to reduce. That type of producing nuclear power is called fission and that type of nuclear power station was called a fermi pile. In fact even though there have been advances in power station technology that is the basic system of how they work. Most nuclear stations are built to withstand an impact of a fighter jet collision and because at one time they had concerns over crashes with Lockhead F104 Starfighters they are the standard one it has to withstand. Hardly any power stations would withstand a collision with a Boeing 747 as it would have to be built deep underground & they are considered much less likely to crash. In the incident at Chernobyl a new device had just been installed and they reduced the power to an unacceptably low amount, not realising it was dangerous as part of testing it. The power station worked at an optimal amount that they shouldn't have devated from. Most nuclear power certainly in the west are built to withstand a moderate eathquake and even a nuclear explosion from a nearby missile. Much of the construction is reinforced concrete and the reactor is normally built in a shell within a shell called a safety cage for added protection. I really enjoyed reading which is around 420 pages and contains no less than 17 appendixes. It's also a very interesting subject in it's own right.

Review # 2 was written on 2012-11-13 00:00:00 Matthew Genuit Through some accident of timing or subject matter or genre, this book has been easy to marginalize. Picking it up in my desire to be a Marilynne Robinson completist, even I was rather stunned at how, for lack of a better word, relevant it proved to be. Written shortly before the end of the Cold War, Mother Country looks beyond the framing of geopolitical and ideological rivalry that characterized that period, the collapse of which led to two decades of short-sighted or dishonest optimism, to tell a shocking story of how governments and their associated experts interact with their people. Two stories, really: the first a retelling of the origins of the British welfare state, the second an exposé of Britain's Sellafield nuclear complex and its discharge of toxic and radioactive materials into the sea and air. The vices she identifies in social thought, journalism, government, and industry-affiliated science are every bit in evidence, even more so, today than they are in Robinson's own account. The exponents of the Poor Laws and their brutish restrictions and disciplines on poor workers are immediately recognizable in a tradition continued by Charles Murray and Paul Ryan (and a hundred more lions of opinion-page morality). The crass dilemma between "jobs" and environmental justice, which is no dilemma at all where the people are used up no less than the soil and water, is exploited reliably today. And these things happen against a background of weird quiescence and credulity. "The apparatus of democracy becomes a sort of Soviet constitution in every instance where there is no will to animate it." People didn't want to hear this in 1989, it seems, but we should definitely try to hear it now. Mother Country strikes me as something like a Rosetta Stone for Robinson's non-fiction work since, which is widely regarded as uneven. The topics and themes she seems continually to be circling in her essays, striking from one direction or another, are treated more fully here (though spoiler alert: there is no mention of John Calvin). That fuller treatment makes, in my opinion anyway, a better case for their urgency and for the preoccupation that apparently resulted than can be expected from the essays. And it gives a picture of the problem she looks to some of her later touchstones, be they John Calvin or the Old Testament or Shakespeare, to provide resources for answering. That may or may not be persuasive, but the problem of the disproportion of our public ideologies and practices to the requirements of human decency and flourishing is very real and urgent, and this book puts it in a harsh and penetrating light.