A thoughtful peek into the guts of a failed reactor and a cautionary tale.
Nuclear engineer Stolmar offers a concise version of the events that precipitated the Chernobyl nuclear disaster and the prospects of the nuclear industry today.
Stolmar examines the design flaws that resulted in the explosion at Chernobyl, with a populist twist. Still, a degree of familiarity with nuclear physics goes a long way toward understanding his contention “that the zirconium-steam reaction was the governing process in all nuclear power plant severe accidents.” He explains the process: impeded water flow initiated a local power increase and a crisis in boiling, which led to a hugely volatile zirconium-steam reaction on the fuel cladding. Beyond that, the author notes, the reactor vessel was too weak to contain a failure and the reactor was uncontained. Yet incredibly, considering these basic design issues, twelve RBMK reactors of the type at Chernobyl are still active today. It is unclear what vested interests in Russia are keeping these plants in operation, and it would have been fascinating for Stolmar–who was born in Hungary and trained in Moscow–to expand on comments like, “[b]ehind our backs, or way above our heads, the intrigues and clan interests were played, so characteristic for the Communist totalitarian system,” regarding nuclear decision-making in the Soviet Union. Though the author’s prose has an appealing Eastern-European inflection, more polish would help lay readers understand the more arcane chemical reactions. Stolmar remains largely in support of nuclear power, which he sees as the only immediate, viable alternative to fuels that are speeding global warming and a way of turning swords to plowshares in decommissioning nuclear weapons. His call for international cooperation in the building and inspection of nuclear facilities is heartening, though spent fuel will be left “to our children as part of their inheritance,” a gift that keeps on decaying.
A thoughtful peek into the guts of a failed reactor and a cautionary tale.Pub Date: Jan. 20, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-4392-2017-7
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 23, 2010
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorkerstaff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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