Atomic review!
Atomic Accidents by James Mahaffey, a book review by Barbara Echard
My takeaway: Nuclear energy is safe; men are stupid!
This book reviews the history of nuclear accidents from the first encounters with radioactive uranium and radon in nature to the more complex accidents involving the manipulation of radioactive material in military and energy fields. The narration is engaging, entertaining, and gossip-like. The pace of the book is lively enough to keep you focused, but detailed enough to present facts with satisfying accuracy.
Regarding my personal experience with this book, I felt that even though it follows a rather linear sequence, some events are foretold, or short passages from the past may result in confusion sometimes, but the purpose of including them makes sense, since it is usually illustrative of the author's points. So, no need to panic when things get messy during the reading; it is always promptly clarified.
Another point that I really liked about this work is the author's talent to explain extremely complex concepts in a simple way without dropping the technical language. The reader can actually learn physics from this book, as technical paragraphs are effectively intertwined with the narration in a dynamic manner.
Now, with the not-so-cool things about this book. Two things made me uncomfortable while reading: too little emotion and too much patriotism. On the one hand, we have lengthy, detailed paragraphs and descriptive adjectives to what seems to me like the "heroes" of each episode (mostly male). Entrepreneurs, scientists, military officers involved in the accidents themselves, sometimes even responsible for them, are described in a detailed, colourful way, with many positive qualifiers, whereas the victims of the accidents are mostly described in terms of numbers, merely statistics. Human tragedy is not as much portrayed in the book as one would expect from the title. On the other hand, the author's bias is a bit too evident at times. The chapters accounting for the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings, though honest in the strategic role they played, never described the huge human tragedy they were further than stating the number of casualties and the mechanics of the explosion. In contrast, later, the accidents of scientists Daghlian and Slotin can effectively bring you to tears. So the acknowledgement of how much these accidents are, in fact, a painful, hopeless, dark human experience depends on who the victim is and where they are from in this book.
Notwithstanding the lack of emotional human weight, the human factor is, in contrast, quite clear. Chapter after chapter, the author's thesis leaks like molten uranium during a criticality event: overconfidence, negligence, and arrogance are the leading causes of atomic accidents. Men deciding to just try something quickly, men too messy to label containers properly, another man who decided to disregard protocol just to do things quickly, lack of emergency procedures for criticality events that were deemed "impossible", men too obedient to use critical thinking, etc. The feminist reader may also see through the stupidity of all those involved. Years of expertise of men wasted in futile decisions of other men, or sometimes themselves.
Another point that emerges from the reading is that most innovations were made in wartime, or motivated by what the "enemy" is up to, rather than human development. Nuclear power plants for electricity were originally plutonium factories that found no purpose after the Cold War. Most mechanical principles of power plants were inherited from General Rickover's nuclear submarine reactor in the 50s and, as such, were still operated as if underwater, obsessively protecting the reactor's productive capacity in emergencies, rather than avoiding meltdowns; case in point, Fukushima I. Overall, very little nuclear development in energy and health was undertaken for the sake of humanity; rather, it was a "waste product" of men's everlasting pursuit of larger and larger explosions.
But hey! This is my first Mahaffey reading, and after searching the author and discovering he has written an entire series of books, acknowledging his science background, but more importantly, his talent as a science communicator guarantees that I will be reading and enjoying his whole catalogue.
If you, like me, like to go through the whole rabbit hole on a topic, below are some nice YouTube videos I found that pair nicely with this read. Especially those lesser-known cases.
The demon Core: https://youtu.be/aFlromB6SnU?si=hzIXsS-gQIcaDeqX
Robert Peabody, the Atomic man: https://youtu.be/4CZ3GVntMDs?si=vDz-JP0kpy2psZye
Goldsboro B-52: https://youtu.be/zO3sCdAmwPw?si=LwC7VUAkJj2aGKn_
For a summary of the three main types of Nuclear Reactors: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0CFU96n2llc
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