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Best Sellers | | Home Atomic Awakening: A New Look at the History and Future of Nuclear Power | |
|  | |  | | | Atomic Awakening: A New Look at the History and Future of Nuclear Power | | | | | SKU:
8085092 | | In Stock | | Availability:
Usually ships in 1 business days | | Only 3 left in stock, order soon! | | | | | | Nuclear power is a paradox of danger and salvation—how is it that the renewable energy source our society so desperately needs is the one we are most afraid to use? The American public's introduction to nuclear technology was manifested in destruction and death. With Hiroshima and the Cold War still ringing in our ears, our perception of all things nuclear is seen through the lens of weapons development. Nuclear power is full of mind-bending theories, deep secrets, and the misdirection of public consciousness, some deliberate, some accidental. The result of this fixation on bombs and fallout is that the development of a non-polluting, renewable energy source stands frozen in time.
It has been said that if gasoline were first used to make napalm bombs, we would all be driving electric cars. Our skewed perception of nuclear power is what makes James Mahaffey's new look at the extraordinary paradox of nuclear power so compelling. From medieval alchemy to Marie curie, Albert Einstein, and the Manhattan Project, atomic science is far from the spawn of a wicked weapons program. The discovery that the atom can be split brought forth the ultimate puzzle of the modern age: Now that the energy of the universe is available to us, how do we use it? For death and destruction? Or as a fuel for our society that has minimal impact on the environment and future generations?
Outlining nuclear energy's discovery and applications throughout history, Mahaffey's brilliant and accessible book is essential to understanding the astounding phenomenon of nuclear power in an age where renewable energy and climate change have become the defining concerns of the twenty-first century.
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| | Product Details | | Author: | James Mahaffey | | Hardcover: | 352 pages | | Publisher: | Pegasus | | Publication Date: | June 23, 2009 | | Language: | English | | ISBN: | 1605980404 | | Product Length: | 9.1 inches | | Product Width: | 6.3 inches | | Product Height: | 1.4 inches | | Product Weight: | 1.4 pounds | | Package Length: | 9.0 inches | | Package Width: | 6.0 inches | | Package Height: | 1.3 inches | | Package Weight: | 1.45 pounds | | Average Customer Rating: |  based on 23 reviews |
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| | Customer Reviews | Average Customer Review: ( 23 customer reviews )
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
19 of 19 found the following review helpful:
 Reader Praise for Atomic Awakening Jun 10, 2009
By Beverly Dezenberg
This book is fascinating. The material is beautifully organized and surprisingly entertaining. It tracks atomic/nuclear research from earliest days to the present, when many countries already generate sizable percentages of their electrical power from nuclear reactors. As a liberal arts major, I wasn't sure I would understand much of this, but the writing is aimed at anyone interested in the subject. I thoroughly enjoyed the book and learned a great deal. Anyone interested in nuclear energy as clean, safe power - pro or con - would be glad they read this book.
13 of 13 found the following review helpful:
Thoroughly fascinating -- serious subject Jun 16, 2009
By C. T. Brown
A thoroughly fascinating book about a serious subject. The author provides a very interesting history of the birth and development of the atomic age and sprinkles it with numerous, little known facts and stories to personalize the adventure. The book makes a strong case for the pursuit of nuclear energy in the U.S. at a time when that industry is resurging around the world, and may be awaking in the U.S. Through factual presentation, understatement, and a dry wit, the author presents the case for nuclear power to the reader and allows the reader to reach his own conclusons. I had difficulty putting it down until I had finished it.
12 of 12 found the following review helpful:
Theory and Practice - a balanced approach Aug 08, 2009
By James E. Lester
The Holy Trinity of science best sellers like Brian Green's "The Elegant Universe or Walter" Issacson's "Einstein: His Life and Universe" has been people, history and science. James Mahaffey's Atomic Awakening breaks this mold with addition of application, interrelation and a point of view.
Mahaffey, a nuclear engineer as well as physicist, gives an extremely readable, no entertaining, history of nuclear physics. He also explains the science better than any other book I've read on physics. Because he shows the interrelation of theory and practice I finally understand Heisenberg's theory of uncertainty and why the key to a nuclear reactor is to slow down, not speed up, the neutrons. That is, if you cannot know with certainty where the Uranium atoms are you have a better chance of hitting one if the added neutrons spend more time in the target area by going slow!
Mahaffey brings the theory to practice without editorializing by comparing the devil we know with the devil we don't know. His well quoted example that if the first use of gasoline was napalm we would all be driving electric cars is dead on. Mahaffey describes the dangers of a nuclear accident, balances that with the cost of non-nuclear alternatives, then leaves the conclusion to the reader.
7 of 7 found the following review helpful:
How we should learn from history Jan 19, 2010
By Edward Durney
James Mahaffey, a scientist at the Georgia Tech Research Institute, writes about the nuclear power industry that he has spent his life in. His history goes back well before his time, though, to the dawn of nuclear power. Then traces nuclear power from those early days through to today. Filled with stories and details, Mahaffey's history powerfully makes his point -- that nuclear power will be our power source for the future.
Mahaffey writes well. His history has both humor and drama. He gives sober thought to the drawbacks of nuclear power, and admits they are real. But the drawbacks can be countered. On balance, the advantages weigh so heavily against the drawbacks that we should, Mahaffey argues, power our way forward with nuclear power.
First, a couple of minor points. The footnotes are footnotes, at the bottom of the page, rather than endnotes at the back of the book. With Mahaffey's style, that adds immensely to ease of reading. And the tidbits Mahaffey feeds the reader are choice. They add spice and flavor to the main meal.
Just one example: Mahaffey tells how a key Manhattan Project meeting was secretly held in northern California at the Bohemian Grove, out in the redwoods in the middle of nowhere. Mahaffey drops a footnote to give us President Nixon's comment on the Bohemian Grove that was caught on tape: "The Bohemian Grove -- which I attend from time to time -- it is the most faggy goddamned thing you could ever imagine, with that San Francisco crowd. I can't shake hands with anybody from San Francisco." Vintage Nixon.
Mahaffey's book has a few weaknesses. Sometimes the humor seems forced. Sometimes the narrative drifts off topic. Sometimes the facts are wrong. (Like when Mahaffey says in a footnote that the Pentagon was originally designed to be a hospital. The author of a recent history of the Pentagon says that is a myth.)
But the strengths of the book more than make up for that. You do not need to be a scientist or engineer to understand this book. Yet the book delves into the details. This book is meat, not milk. Yet Mahaffey does not force feed the reader. He lets (for the most part, at least) the history speaks for itself. And though Mahaffey is a scientist, not a historian, he can tell a story very well. Excellent historical work.
24 of 30 found the following review helpful:
 Interesting. And badly flawed. Apr 12, 2010
By Paul
Mahaffey's book is an entertaining read, but he bungles enough physics and history of physics to make one wonder if some of his history-of-nuclear-power lore is more tall-tales-around-the-campfire than it is accurate accounts of what really happened.
First, the interesting stuff: Assuming he got these things right, we learn a fair amount about the vision and doggedness of Hyman Rickover, the father of our nuclear navy. There are also interesting, detailed accounts of various reactor accidents -- not just the obvious (Three Mile Island and Chernobyl) but also the obscure (the Windscale 1 reactor in Great Britain, and a number of cases at what's now called the Idaho Nuclear Engineering Laboratory near Arco, ID).
For another example, Mahaffey's account of the proceedings as Fermi turned on the world's first artificial sustained nuclear reaction at the University of Chicago in December, 1942 contains lots of relevant details I'd not read before (compare with Richard Rhodes's superb book, The Making of the Atomic Bomb).
Mahaffey also discusses in detail the history of approaches to nuclear-powered aircraft and rockets. In hindsight, this seems like pretty fanciful stuff, but he makes clear that it was the product of the age of American exuberance, post World War II.
Further, Mahaffey makes reasonable comparisons of the nuclear power industry's safety record with that of other industries. He says that Chernobyl, in 1986, caused 55 deaths (though I doubt that he has included here the later deaths due to the widespread radiation cloud) while 1984's Bhopal, India chemical disaster killed about 15,000.
It's also worth noting that the book is well written, something one can't count on these days, despite the (purported) involvement of editors.
So why only two stars? I would have given three, but in first reading the book, I skipped Chapters 3 and 4 of Part I and Chapters 1 and 2 of Part II (pages 47 through 156), because it appeared to be about more history that I, as a physicist myself, already knew, and I wanted to move on to see what Mahaffey had to say about the prospects for nuclear power, looking ahead from our current situation. Actually, he doesn't say much about this - except to assert that the nuclearization of our economy is inevitable - and the book after page 133 is largely about those accidents and about those gee-whiz applications that never materialized.
So I circled back to read the skipped pages, thinking they might answer some questions I had from reading the later chapters. But mostly what I came away with was astonishment that Mahaffey, who says he was an undergrad physics major, could so badly mangle basic facts about physics and the history of physics. Actually, there's some of this in the rest of the book, too, but those chapters really drove home the point that, if the author is this squirrelly about basics, there may be lots of careless assertions in the rest of the book, too.
Examples:
Page xxi [introduction]. Einstein is identified as a "nuclear physicist," but he wasn't, and the proposed application to bombs was a surprise to him when Szilard brought it up.
Page 16. Mahaffey writes something strongly suggesting he thinks Faraday discovered that an electric current produces a magnetic field. Actually, this was Oersted's discovery.
Pages 53 - 54. Mahaffey tells us that Planck's crucial research was on the photoelectric effect and that the value of Planck's constant wasn't determined until years later. Further, he implies that Planck was an experimentalist. These are all glaring errors. As Wolfgang Pauli would have said, on these points, Mahaffey "isn't even wrong." The facts are that Planck "discovered" quantum theory by coming up with a mathematical formula that perfectly fit the blackbody radiation curve determined by contemporary experimentalists, and, in so doing, he derived a reasonable value for what's now known as "Planck's constant." Further, Planck was purely a theoretician.
Page 80. "If hydrogen has an atomic weight of 1, then helium weighs 4. Nitrogen, further up the weight scale, has 7 protons, but has an atomic weight of 17." It's hard to believe that Mahaffey's "17" is merely a typo.
Page 151. I. I. Rabi is identified as "another very capable theorist from Hungary." In fact, Rabi had immigrated to the U.S. at about age 3, with his family, from Galicia, in what's now Poland. And Rabi was, like Fermi, both experimentalist and theoretician.
In his acknowledgements, Mahaffey thanks physicists Douglas Wrege and Don Harmer and nuclear engineer Monte Davis "for checking the manuscript for technical accuracy and clarity." These three gentlemen, who also provided glowing endorsement blurbs for the book's back cover, must not have checked very carefully.
Note that none of the errors I've pointed to detract from understanding the rest of the book. But the carelessness of their existence -- each one could easily have been checked and corrected -- casts doubt on the accuracy of the stories Mahaffey tells us.
See all 23 customer reviews on Amazon.com
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