- wiki.keithl.com/NuclearPower .
Atomic Dreams
The New Nuclear Evangelists and the Fight for the Future of Energy
Rebecca Tuhus-Dubrow . 2025 . Bvt Lib 363.1799 TUH
AWFUL citation-notes process. Write down the citation number and the chapter title, look up the chapter number in the table of contents in the front, then find the chapter number in back and the citation number below it. NO INDEX There is no practical reason for this There is plenty of room on the NOTES chapter number line to include chapter titles. If this is the policy at Algonquin Books, I will avoid purchasing their books, and steer my author friends elsewhere. I hope this page is useful to other readers (if any) of this book.
p013 Ch01 The Land
p018 Ch02 "Don't shut it down!"
p028 Ch03 The Club
p040 Ch04 The Plant
p049 Ch05 "Kiss your children goodbye"
p061 Ch06 The Bad Boys
p071 2007 Nordhaus Shellenberger Break Through: From the Death of Environmentalism to the Politics of Possibility
- PSU basement GE197 .N67 2007
p073 Ch07 Conversions
p073 Tom Blees (many papers and books at PSU library)
- sky-hitching, asking passengers of private planes if he could ride along
p077 Integral Fast Reactor IFR April 3 1986 in Till and Chang Plentiful Energy
- p077 two experiments both succeeded, press release ignored
p080 Blees Prescription for the Planet 2008
p081 Lovins "soft renewables" stagnant, remain small percentage
- p081 If US opts out of IFR, no influence on standards and controls
p084 Ch08 The Deal
p085 Stewart Brand Whole Earth Discipline
p086 Brand's 1968-1973 wife Lois Jennings Britton Whole Earth Catalog
p087 Ryan Phelan 40+ years
p090 Amory Lovins attack in Grist
p091 George Monbiot n19 Fukushima converted me to nuclear power
p091 Pandora's Promise 2013
- p094 the frisson of feeling like a maverick has always been one element of the pro-nuclear movement
- p097 Michael Shellenberger bought cell phone so Obama could call him for advice
- p097 Shellenberger and Nordhaus "divorce" approx. 2015
p099 Ch09 "We are as gods and have to get good at it"
n1 Davis Freeman The Green Cowboy: An Energetic Life 2016
- p100 interprets small Diablo Canyon coolant leak in 2014 as "Shut me down for good before I kill you" message from plant.
p107 2004 1st PG&E bankruptcy due to deregulation and Enron manipulation
p109 FOE lobbies for shutdown, PG&E lobbies for 30 years
Diablo Canyon Power Plant 2030 Planned decommission date
p110 Ch10 "The motherly side of nuclear"
p110 Heather Hoff and Kristin Zaitz founders Mothers for Nuclear
p114 FAQ "safest way to create grid power, period"
- p117 SONGS = San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station
p119 Ch11 The Nuclearists'
p120 Eric Meyer / March for Environmental Hope, Generation Atomic
p131 Fukushima nuclear accident, evacuations far worse than radiation risks |
p132 2015 Lancet nuclear aftermath, damage psychological, not physical
- p134 Hansen Kharecha 2013 Nuclear Power Saves Lives. Nature paywalled
p134 Japan/Germany nuclear shutdowns led to 28,000 pollution deaths
p135 Church Rock uranium mill spill
- n22 Michael Shellenberger "If Renewables Are So Great for the Environment, Why Do They Keep Destroying It?" Forbes May 17, 2018
p137 Ch12 The Tribe
p145 Ch13 "But what about the waste?
- p149 "hottest elements" (isotopes) decay fastest
p149 if nuclear reaction poisons removed, spent fuel retains 90% of energy
- Carter shut down reprocessing to prevent weapons diversion, setting an example, which other countries ignored
- p151 U.S. waste storage ignored local consent, Finland and Sweden engaged communities from outset
p161 Ch14 The Guy in the Headband
p163 Edward Calabrese Hormesis
p163 Thomas Neff A Uranium Grand Bargain weapons to fuel
p171 Ch15 The Inside Game
p174 GAIN Gateway for Accelerated Innovation in Nuclear initiative
p174 ClearPath from conservative perspective
p177 Green New Deal 2018
p177 Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Integral Fast Reactor
- n10 "The Nuclear Power Dilemma, Union of Concerned Scientists, October 9, 2018
p179 Ch16 "A heretic among heretics"
- p180 more Shellenberger associated pro-nuclear groups
p182 Stand Up for Nuclear
p188 ecomodernism
- p189 Deaths from natural disasters, 524K in 1920, 78K in 2000, 41K in 2020, due to better systems
p189 Kerry Emanuel MIT meteorologist, left Environmental Progress
p191 Ch17 Nuclear Spring
p191 1972 Oklo natural fission reactor
- p193 will use reprocessed fuel from Integral Fast Reactor
p203 Ch18 The Turning Point
p203 Isabelle Boemeke fashion model, nuclear advocate
p209 Third Way
p211 Clean Air Task Force
- p212 Extend Diablo Canyon support: 58% of California voters, 74% of San Luis Obispo county voters
p216 Ch19 A Social and Political Problem
p216 Charlyne Smith from Jamaica in 2012
p219 Hans Rosling 2010 The Magic Washing Machine
- 1948-2017 pancreatic cancer
- p225 energy tribalism ... instead, share best practices between all energy activists
p227 Terra Praxis ( Ten Terawatt initiative )
p229 Ch20 Diablo Canyon Lives
p234 California SB 846 extending Diablo Canyon license to 2029
- p239 Diablo Canyon is on native land, no compensation ever paid
p241 Ch20 Epilogue
p242 Extreme nuclear risk estimates from MIT science historian Kate Brown
- p244-245 pro- and anti-nuclear both heavily funded, neither are "little guys"
The Power of Nuclear
The Rise, Fall, and Return of our Mightiest Energy Source
Marco Visscher . 2024 . Bvt Lib 333.7924 VIS
p019 ch01 Pandemonium: Why did we have to split the atom
p025 note 8 1925 Patrick Blackett ejects protons from nitrogen
p027 Leo Szilard supported himself with patents: 1928 linear accelerator, 1928 electron microscope, 1929 cyclotron, 1930 Einstein refrigerator 1944 nuclear reactor
p037 ch02 A Welcome Distraction; Why the enthusiasm about nuclear energy?
p050 Tsar Bomba AN602 1961 October 30 50MT
- 60km mushroom cloud ( 67 km Wikipedia )
p051 Calder Hall 1956-2003 240 MWe, weapons plutonium
p053 Abdul Qadeer Khan 1998 Pakistan weapon, also Iran, Libya, North Korea
p055 ch03 Why the resistance to nuclear energy?
p061 n10 p278 E. Sternglass Sep 1969 "The Death of All Children"
p062 David McTaggart 1972 yacht protest, French test cancelled
- p064 No Nukes conflates weapons and nuclear power
p065 C. P. Snow physicist, novelist (smoked, died of pneumonia age 74}
p067 E. F. Schumacher Small is Beautiful, praised Burma (with ethnic violence and 40 year life expectancy
p070 Günther Schwab Nazi, Ecofascism WSL
- p071 fossil-fuelled central capacity was better (coal and gas) because that would greatly benefit national well-being
ch3 n34 Kernenerhgie Nota 1972
- p071 Schumacher lamented ... too many British coal mines were closed in the 1960s
p081 ch04 Doomed: What went wrong in the world's biggest nuclear disaster?
- p095 Chernobyl "bridge of death" urban legend
- p096 stories that are "conveniently terrifying"
- p097 they searched and found nothing
- p100 ... very little death ... uncomfortable questions ...
- p100 could it be that radiation is not nearly as terrible as we think?
p101 ch05 A Strange Glow: How dangerous is radiation?
p102 Ruhmkorff induction coil 1895 X rays
- p103 James Garfield died of infection after doctor probed bullet wound with dirty fingres
- p105 Marie Curie carried radium vial in breast pocket of lab coat
p106 Röntgen died "penniless" in his country home age 77
p110 Radium jaw
- p114 5000 mSv 50% fatal in months, 1000 mSv burns, 100 mSv some tissue damage
p115 Ramsar Iran 10 mSv/year average, as much as 260 mSv/year
p118 ch5 n20 p284 Perhaps we humans lack a specific organ for sensing ionizing radiation simply because we do not need one
p119 ch06 Exodus: What should we (not) do after a nuclear accident
- p121 March 2011 Fukushima 2011 book Meltdown: Inside the Fukushima Nuclear Crisis
p121 Japan prime minister Naoto Kan, calm message then emergency and evacuation ... 2km radius, then 10km, then 20
- p122 government monthly allowance for fleeing families
- p123 main health impact non-physical anxiety
- p124 Average first year exposure less than 6 mSv, less than flight attendant annual dose
- p125 zero radiation deaths around Fukushima
p125 2313 deaths attributed to evacuation and stress in Fukushima prefecture alone
p126 samosely illegal Chernobyl resettlers fared better than evacuees
p127 hibukusha survivors shunned
p132 Strong In The Rain
- the mundane reality is nothing like wild fear fantasies
p134 Starving Vrit Keely
p135 Farmer Hisashi Tarukawa could no longer sell rice, hung himself
p145 ch07 Peace With the Atomic Bomb: Have nuclear weapons really made the world less safe?
- p149 Oppenheimer recommended strong public engagement, otherwise paranoia and magical thinking
- p154 Ukraine Belarus Kazakhstan sold nuclear weapons to Moscow
p155 Gwyneth Cravens Power to Save the World, U.S. bought 500,000 kg of Russing weapons-grade uranium for power plant fuel
- p156 Alfred Nobel thought "frightful" dynamite would make war impossible
p158 First Ukraine president Leonid Kravchuk "Had we kept the nuclear weapons, they would have treated us differently now"
- p159 Mueller concludes nuclear weapons are not useful
- p160 300 conventional bombings would have done the same damage to Hiroshima and Nagasaki
- p160 B-29 development ($3B... $54B in 2025 ) far(sic) more expensive than Manhattan project ($2B ... $36B in 2025)
- p160 1945 March Tokyo incendiary bombing, stench awful at bomer altitude
- p161 Hiroshima/Nagasaki, no more than 1000 excess cases of cander
- p162 bomb gave Hirohito excuse to surrender (without war crime trial)
p289 ch7 n20 2019 Feb 08 Benjamin Plackett https://www.aip.org/inside-science/the-science-of-dismantling-a-nuclear-bomb
p165 ch08 Perverse Incentives: Did the nuclear industry start the decline of nuclear energy?
p174 linear no-threshold hypothesis
emerged from Rockefeller Foundation endowed by Standard Oil
divestiture announced 2022, before book publication but a century after Hermann Muller's unproven? claim
- p178 ICRP: LNT unlikely to underestimate risk
p178 Lauriston Taylor 1980 deeply immoral use of our scientific heritage Some nonscientific influences ...
p179 Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists ... "are just too dangerous to exist"
p179 Electricity Generation and Health Lancet 2007 energy saves lives, nuclear by far the safest
- p181 Oppenheimer ... have known sin
- p182 nuclear plants "in need of constant ($400M/plant) modification"
- p183 decommissioning $1.2B
p183 the revenue model since ALARA
p184 Muller could have known he was wrong (about LNT) 2012
p185 Ernst Caspari
p15 n40 E. Caspari and C. Stern 1948 The influence of chronic irradiation with gamma-rays at low doses on the mutation rate in Drosphila melanogaster
p189 ch09 Heated: How can nuclear energy combat climate change?
p191 Svante Arrhenius 1859-1927 1896 divorced/depressed calculated CO₂ effects
- p192 logarithmic effect: doubling CO₂ increases temperature 4℃
- p193 plants grow faster in denser CO₂
- p195 Coal 840g CO₂/KWh, natural gas 490g CO₂/KWh, biomass 230g CO₂/KWh nuclear 12g CO₂/KWh
p195 Greenpeace claims no significant savings coal to nuclear
- p197 while closing nuclear plants, Germans burned more coal, and dismantled a wind farm to expand a coal mine
p197 British started Hinkley Point nuclear power station
p198 ex-chancellor Gerhard SchröderNord Stream EU paid €100B/y to Russians for coal, gas, and oil
- p198 EU paid €100B/y to Russians for coal, gas, and oil
- p199 keeping a nuclear plant open is the cheapest and fastest way to produce ... low-carbon power
- p201 book mentions her support for gas power, Wikipedia mentions her support for nuclear power, added to WP April 2022 after Russian invasion of Ukraine
- p202 "Opponents pf nuclear power have turned out to be the useful idiots of the world's most polluting industry" hmmm.
- p203 "Carter has decided that nuclear power was no longer required" hmmm
WP: In 1977 ... called for ... carefully controlled expansion of nuclear power.
- p204 In 2000, the share of solar power in the supply of US electricity was a mere 0.01%
And in 2022, when the Dutch edition of this book was first published, the share was 4.7%, a 24.14% year-on-year increase over 2021. That is a doubling every 3 years ... or (extrapolating logaritmically absurdly) 100% in 2035. Ah, the smell of grinding axes.
- p205 Margaret Thatcher calls for greenhouse gas emission reductions, speaking to the U.N. on November 1989
p206 Greenpeace ]senior energy expert Jan Haverkamp 2019 "Sabotaging nuclear is a vital part of any successful attempt to save the climate" ... attribution tenuous
p207 Britta Augustin assaulted? video missing, this comment (original is German) in it's place: "Since the original video has strangely disappeared, here is my recording of the physical attack on a #nuclear power supporter amidst approving cheers from the crowd during the #FFF #climatestrike."
p208 Naomi Oreskes labels James Hansen as a climate change denier, when he's a "renewables only" skeptic.
p211 "the nuclear industry funded the research of Charles Keeling ... uh, no, his initial Mauna Loa CO₂ measurements were funded by the IGY and Scripps
p215 ch10 Hidden Treasure: What should we do with nuclear waste?
p215 "Olkiluoto" nuclear waste repository
- p217 1983 moratorium on ocean nuclear waste dumping, 1994 international ban
- p217 "because of the dilution, no plankton will ever notice"
- p218 sloppy description of waste radioactivity decay
p219 integral fast reactor 1994 cancelled by Clinton
p224 bs about bs Jack Devanney Why Nuclear Power Has Been a Flop
p224 Sébastien Briat "Darwined" himself on train tracks
- p225 Local cooperation will decide where waste goes; some communities welcoming
p228 Russian BN-800 only deployed breeder reactor
p234 ch11 Dreaming of Progress: What does the future of nuclear energy look like?
p238 Terrapower 345MWe Natrium molten salt reactor in Kemmerer WY by 2030
p239 AP1000
- p239 Hyman Rickover 1957 Any plant you haven’t built yet is always more efficient than the one you have built. This is obvious. They are all efficient when you haven’t done anything on them, in the talking stage. Then they are all efficient, they are all cheap. They are all easy to build, and none have any problems.
- p245 uranium in seawater ... fooey. 3.3 μg/liter. Salt is 129 g/L, so uranium is 26 parts per billion of salt. Uranium is 20 parts per million of New Hampshire granite, and 1200 parts per billion (0.12%) of Wyoming granite
- p248 Monbiot learned to love ... see .p91 note for Atomic Dreams, above
- p250 "I'm not against nuclear power, I'm against the technology currently in use" - Wim Turkenburg
- p253 Greta Thunberg attended the same private school as Swedish royal family
- p254 C. P. Snow:
- For, of course, one truth is straightforward. Industrialisation is the only hope of the poor. I use the word 'hope' in a crude and prosaic sense. I have not much use for the moral sensibility of anyone who is too refined to use it so. It is all very well for us, sitting pretty, to think that material standards of living don't matter all that much. It is all very well for one, as a personal choice, to reject industrialisation—do a modern Walden, if you like, and if you go without much food, see most of your children die in infancy, despise the comforts of literacy, accept twenty years off your own life, then I respect you for the strength of your aesthetic revulsion.
- But I don't respect you in the slightest if, even passively, you try to impose the same choice on others who are not free to choose. In fact, we know what their choice would be. For, with singular unanimity, in any country where they have had the chance, the poor have walked off the land into the factories as fast as the factories could take them.”
- p258 "technofix" 1966 neologism, a recommendation by nuclear physicist Alvin Weinberg
p261 Epilogue: A feeling of Awe
- p261 Author was antinuclear in 2000
p264 Zaporizhzhia safer than Fukushima
p265 IAEA 'Nuclear Safety, Security, and Safeguards in Ukraine ... September 2022
p267 Acknowledgements
p269 A note on sources
---
p270 Atomic Obsession 2010 John Mueller
p271 James A, Mahaffey Atomic Accidents: A History of Nuclear Meltdowns and Disasters: From the Ozark Mountains to Fukushima
p271 Yoichi Funabashi Meltdown: Inside the Fukushima Nuclear Crisis
p272 Notes (above)