American Scientist

On July 16, 1945, near Alamogordo, New Mexico, the first nuclear weapon was successfully tested.

The Atomic Age that followed has seen political, social, environmental, and economic strife surrounding all things nuclear, from weapons to power generators.

On the 70th anniversary of this path-altering event, here we collect a selection of articles and book reviews from American Scientist that cover this controversial topic from multiple angles. (For a more complete listing of content, see this subject page here.)

Articles:

A Path for Nuclear Power
A novel but tested technology, the pebble-bed reactor, can make fission energy safe. (March–April 2014)

Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactors
An old idea in nuclear power gets reexamined. (July–August 2010)

Growing Up with Chernobyl
Working in a radioactive zone, two scientists learn tough lessons about politics, bias and the challenges of doing good science. (Nov–Dec 2006)

Fallout from Nuclear Weapons Tests and Cancer Risks
Exposures 50 years ago still have health implications today that will continue into the future. (Jan–Feb 2006)

Detecting Illicit Nuclear Materials
The installation of radiological monitoring equipment in the United States and overseas is helping thwart nuclear terrorism. (Sept–Oct 2005)

Managing the Environmental Legacy of U.S. Nuclear-Weapons Production
Although the waste from America's arms buildup will never be "cleaned up," human and environmental risks can be reduced and managed. (Nov–Dec 2002)

A Nuke on the Yukon?
Mini-nukes arrive at the regulatory gate. Will they get through? (March–April 2009)
“The key to Galena’s ambitions is the Toshiba 4S—the Super-Safe, Small and Simple reactor, a torpedo-shaped unit on the drawing board that surrounds a core about 2 meters long and 0.6 meters across. The entire unit, core and casing, is to be manufactured off-site by Toshiba, delivered to the customer, and then lowered into a cylindrical concrete vault 30 meters underground. Expected to run for 30 years with minimal operator intervention, the 4S is designed to pump out 10 megawatts of electric power, just 1 percent of the output of conventional nuclear power plants.”

Book reviews:

DEFUSING ARMAGEDDON: Inside NEST, America’s Secret Nuclear Bomb Squad.Jeffrey T. Richelson. xvi + 318 pp. W. W. Norton, 2009. $27.95.
“What would the U.S. government do if it were informed that terrorists had planted nuclear explosives in one or more major U.S. cities? This question may sound hypothetical, but it is not. As Jeffrey T. Richelson reports in Defusing Armageddon, officials were confronted with such warnings more than 100 times between 1970 and 1993, and many times since. Fortunately, all were hoaxes.”

Plutonium: A History of the World's Most Dangerous Element. Jeremy Bernstein. xii + 216 pp. Joseph Henry Press, 2007. $27.95.
“Almost all of the 2,000 metric tons or so of plutonium that exists on Earth today was made in nuclear reactors; about 250 tons of it was created for use in weapons, and the rest came into being as a by-product of the operation of civilian nuclear-power reactors.”

THE BOMB: A Life. Gerard DeGroot. Harvard University Press, 2006. $27.95.
“DeGroot, who writes with grace and wit, offers an overwhelming array of fascinating yet bizarre facts and anecdotes, and he masterfully reveals the complex interface between physicists and politicians. But more than anything, his book gives form to the central cultural feature of the time: the shadow of the mushroom cloud.” 

Three Mile Island: A Nuclear Crisis in Historical Perspective. J. Samuel Walker. xii + 303 pp. University of California Press, 2004. $24.95.
“Walker provides a gripping, detailed account of the accident and an analysis of its impact and significance.”

Sakharov: A Biography. Richard Lourie. xiv + 465 pp. Brandeis University Press, published by University Press of New England, 2002. $30.
“Andrei Sakharov, the theoretical physicist who would become the father of the Soviet H-bomb, was recognized early on by his peers as a ‘magician’—one of those geniuses of whom it is said that ‘Even after we understand what they have done, the process by which they have done it is completely dark.’”

India's Nuclear Bomb: Impact on Global Proliferation. George Perkovich. 597pp. University of California Press, 1999. $39.95.
“The international movement toward nuclear nonproliferation was frustrated by India's nuclear weapons tests in May 1998. Through this scholarly documentation of the history of India's nuclear weapons program, George Perkovich addresses the questions of why India developed its nuclear weapons capability when it did, what factors kept it from stopping or reversing the program and what effects the United States had on India's nuclear intentions and capabilities.”