Reviews for The International Law of Nuclear Energy: Basic Documents

The average rating for The International Law of Nuclear Energy: Basic Documents based on 2 reviews is 5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2020-09-02 00:00:00 Stephen Cilurso This is a dry, impartial history of the history of radiation protection standards under the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and it's predecessor and successor agencies. What they were, and how they got that way. I don't think it was intended to rouse the reader to fury, but in my case, that is what it did. I have always been skeptical of the "linear, no-threshold" dose-response theory in radiation protection; not that I know it is wrong, but how can we know it is right, when talking about very small doses applied over a long time? In other fields, like pharmacology, it is well known that small doses may have very different effects than large ones, for example. In fields like exposure to radiation in space environments, we are often talking about doses which may be significant over a year, but which come in very small doses every day. So I was curious to understand how this theory came in to being. To find that when it was adopted, it was well known by most experts to be wrong -- but they knew it was conservative, and there was no agreement on what was right -- was interesting. To find that they nevertheless set the radiation standards based on it, because while probably conservative, it was not hard to comply with those limits, was surprising. To find that every time there was a public concern over radiation, they simply tightened the standard WITHOUT CHALLENGING THE MODEL was shocking. But what truly angered me was the discovery of how ONE person, who was on these committees, shaped so much of the debate. John W. Gofman was a name I recognized; I'd read an anti-nuclear pamphlet of his back in high school and been very disappointed at the one-sided, exaggerated view of radiation dangers even then. To find that this one person had created, out of very little data, the perception that radiation standards needed to be tightened, not just once, but over and over, and then gone on to campaign against nuclear power because in the past, there had been emissions (legal at the time) beyond the now-tightened standards, really angered me. If I hadn't known who this was, I wouldn't have understood the significance of his appearance in the narrative (and the book doesn't discuss his later career at all). In short, I think this book, if carefully read, gives a great deal of insight in to how thin the foundation is for the risks of low doses of radiation spread out over a long time.

Review # 2 was written on 2012-12-31 00:00:00 Adam Mitchell Five stars for a well reasoned and revolutionary approach to US energy policy. Worth the read. Not spellbinding but I found it readable.