Nuclear Engineering

America's Nuclear Wastelands presents an expert, yet straightforward overview of this complex topic, including nuclear weapons history and contamination issues. The author, a government consultant with a long career in Pacific Northwest nuclear waste issues, also explores the current institutional and political environment, demonstrating the critical role of public participation for past and future generations.

After 1991, international organizations from the Red Cross to Greenpeace sought to help the victims, yet found themselves stymied by post-Soviet political circumstances they did not understand. International diplomats and scientists allied to the nuclear industry evaded or denied the fact of a wide-scale public health disaster caused by radiation exposure. Efforts to spin the story about Chernobyl were largely successful; the official death toll ranges between 31 and 54 people. In reality, radiation exposure from the disaster caused between 35,000 and 150,000 deaths in Ukraine alone.

The survivors are trapped. Cut off from the rest of the world and quarantined as the virus spreads to every corner of the country, while the combined forces of the naval fleet set sail for deeper waters and leave the UK to its fate. Facing the aftermath of the battle for the island, the groups are separated as the bonds of friendship and camaraderie are violently severed, and they must survive on their own. Every effort to survive is fraught with peril, and those left behind must battle to find some form of safety, no matter how brief that respite might be.

The Chernobyl power plant was the hope for energy in the Ukraine. Years after the 1986 meltdown, Ukraine is still feeling the effects of its radiation. The Nuclear Disaster at Chernobyl is part of the Disasters series. These moments in history recall the death and destruction caused by both natural and manmade disasters around the world.

Low level radiation is all around us. Based on years of research, the author has gathered medical data that clearly shows that certain foods and supplements have protective properties, which can safeguard you from low level radiation. The author presents theories on how these foods stave off the effects of radiation and suggests recipes that maximize their protective powers in our increasingly toxic post-Fukushima world.

Tim Koeth peered into the crumpled brown paper bag; inside was a surprisingly heavy black metal cube. He recognized the mysterious object instantly—he had one just like it sitting on his desk at home. It was uranium metal, taken from the nuclear reactor that Nazi scientists had tried—and failed—to build at the end of World War II. This unexpected gift, wrapped in a piece of paper inscribed with a few cryptic but crucial lines, would launch Koeth, a nuclear physicist and professor, and his colleague Miriam Hiebert, a cultural heritage scientist, on an odyssey to trace the tale of these cubes.

Today, there are over 100 nuclear reactors operating in our backyards, from Indian Point in New York to Diablo Canyon in California. Proponents claim that nuclear power is the only viable alternative to fossil fuels, and due to rising energy consumption and the looming threat of global warming, they are pushing for an even greater investment.

As award-winning biographer and science writer Graham Farmelo describes in Churchill's Bomb, the British set out to investigate the possibility of building nuclear weapons before their American colleagues. But when scientists in Britain first discovered a way to build an atomic bomb, Prime Minister Winston Churchill did not make the most of his country's lead and was slow to realize the bomb's strategic implications.

In the late 1930s, legendary financier, philanthropist, and society figure Alfred Lee Loomis gathered the most visionary scientific minds of the 20th century at his state-of-the-art laboratory in Tuxedo Park, New York. He established a top-secret defense laboratory at MIT and personally bankrolled pioneering research into new, high-powered radar detection systems that helped defeat the German Air Force and U-boats. With Ernest Lawrence, he pushed Franklin Delano Roosevelt to fund research in nuclear fission, which led to the development of the atomic bomb.

What began as a scientific breakthrough ended as a blueprint for annihilation. In The Atom Unleashed, James Johnson unpacks the explosive history of nuclear discovery—from Einstein’s quiet equations to Chernobyl’s glowing ruins. This is not just the story of a bomb, but the story of how we turned theoretical physics into geopolitical theology, and how one equation rewrote the rules of power, fear, and what it means to be human. With precision and relentless clarity, JJ turns the nuclear story into a mirror—one that forces us to ask not just what we’ve done, but who we became while doing it.

Climate Gamble: Is Anti-Nuclear Activism Endangering Our Future? is a thought-provoking, short, and easy book on one of the biggest problems of our time, climate change, and one of its most misunderstood and misrepresented solutions, nuclear power. This audiobook is based on the updated and revised 2017 edition. It is a production of Generation Atomic.

Perhaps the first environmental engineer at Hanford, Melvin R. Adams spent 24 years on its 586 square miles of desert terrain. His thoughtful vignettes recall challenges and sites he worked on or found personally intriguing - like the 216-U-pond, contaminated with plutonium longer than any other place in the world.