| A BRIGHT FUTURE How Some Countries Have Solved Climate Change and the Rest Can Follow Joshua S. Goldstein Staffan A. Qvist Steven Pinker (Fwd.) New York: PublicAffairs, January 2019 |
Rating: 5.0 High |
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| ISBN-13 978-1-5417-2410-5 | ||||
| ISBN-10 1-5417-2410-0 | 276pp. | HC/BWI | $26.00 | |
| Page 100: | "The effects are extrapolated down from the very high levels of radiation received by victims of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima in 1945." |
| Missing words or number error: S/B "atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki" or "atomic bombing of Hiroshima". |
| Page 111: | "This is the traffic equivalent of lowing the allowable top speed for 'nuclear cars' from 1 mph down to 0.1 mph, while allowing 'coal cars' to drive without speed limits or brakes." |
| Exactly — except that no one is allowing "coal cars" to drive without speed limits or brakes. |
| Page 114: | "Of the many people who feel that nuclear power is just 'too dangerous,' surprisingly few ever ask, 'Compared to what?' It's pretty dangerous compared to fairy dust, which meets the world's growing energy needs without any costs or risks. But compared with the world's leading, and fastest-growing,power source—coal? Compared with oil and gas?" |
| I'm no anti-snark, but I call this excessively snarky. |
| Page 126: | "Spent fuel is left for a couple of years in cooling pools to let the shorter-lived elements decay and then transferred to the casks and placed on a concrete pad to sit and wait for politics to catch up with them." |
| Number error: S/B "it". Alternatively, change the beginning of the sentence to "Spent fuel rods are". |
| Page 134: | "...nor are there any known cases in which individuals or sub-national groups have stolen materials from nuclear power facilities for use in weapons." |
| This is a quote from a report on proliferation, so I should cut it some slack. Nevertheless, I think it's overconfident. My primary reason is a case known for some time in which Israeli agents are suspected of "diverting" bomb-grade uranium from a reprocessing facility in Apollo, Pennsylvania during the 1960s. This was brought up again in 2010, when additional government documents were declassified. The men who broke the original story, Victor Gilinsky and Roger J. Mattson, published a followup that year, and it was covered in this 2014 story. The authors might finesse this by noting that this is not known but only suspected, or that the material wasn't stolen directly from a reactor facility. I sincerely hope they don't. |
| Page 138: | "The U.S. Navy has operated 6,200 reactor-years with no known radiological incident." |
| Again, this may turn on finessing the word "known." My records show several incidents of radioactive releases aboard Navy ships, some reportedly involving crew contamination, according to witnesses or outside sources. |
| Page 163: | "Several companies are pursuing the concept of reactors in which the fuel is a liquid (a molten salt) rather than solid fuel rods, such as today's reactors use." |
| Misplaced comma: S/B "salt), rather than solid fuel rods such". |
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