San Antonio College Library

Originally perceived as a cheap and plentiful source of power, the commercial use of nuclear energy has been controversial for decades. Worries about the dangers that nuclear plants and their radioactive waste posed to nearby communities grew over time, and plant construction in the United States virtually died after the early 1980s. The 1986 disaster at Chernobyl only reinforced nuclear power's negative image. Yet in the decade prior to the Japanese...

This book deals with practical questions of nuclear technology, the design of reactors, the nature of radioactivity, andthe facts behind the assessments of risks and the arguments of policy.

"Notes and sources": pages 305-320.

The authors provide a comprehensive history of United States nuclear policy from 1940 to 1980 from both military and civilian perspectives. Beginning with the development of the atomic bomb, the first atomic tests and an examination of what Roosevelt, Churchill, Stalin and their advisers thought about the use of the bomb, they cover the summit meetings at Yalta and Potsdam, the formation of the Atomic Energy Commission, the hydrogen bomb and Eisenhower's...

"Today we are continuously asked to weigh the benefits of technology against its risks. Do the rewards of nuclear reactors, for example, come with an acceptable degree of risk? Alvin Weinberg coined the term "trans-science" to describe such questions; the answers, of course, are beyond the reach of pure science."--BOOK JACKET. "The intersection of scientific limitations and public expectations has been Weinberg's intellectual realm for more than 30...

The youngest and only woman member of the original team of scientists who worked on the Manhattan Project recounts the scientific, personal, and ethical problems encountered by those who built the first nuclear reactor.

The latest discoveries have been incorporated in this newly revised edition.