{"id":13760,"date":"2022-05-16T13:02:09","date_gmt":"2022-05-16T11:02:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/bbchistory\/?post_type=purple_issue&p=13760"},"modified":"2022-05-16T13:02:09","modified_gmt":"2022-05-16T11:02:09","slug":"generating-fear","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/bbchistory\/2022\/05\/16\/generating-fear\/","title":{"rendered":"Generating fear"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

SCIENCE<\/strong><\/span><\/strong><\/h4>\n\n

Generating fear<\/h1>\n\n

STEPHEN WALKER<\/span> <\/strong>gives a nervous welcome to a history of nuclear power, which focuses on the accidents and the disasters that have plagued the sector<\/h5>\n\n
\"\"
Dangerous clean-up<\/span><\/strong> Workers who are decommissioning the Chernobyl powerplant and surrounding area are checked for radiation in 1990, four years after the most famous nuclear disaster in history <\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n
\"\"<\/figure><\/div>\n\n

Atoms and Ashes: From Bikini Atoll to Fukushima <\/strong><\/p>\n\n

by Serhii Plokhy <\/p>\n\n

Allen Lane, 368 pages, \u00a325<\/h5>\n\n

Unless most life as we know it has been wiped off the face of the planet by the time this review comes out, I\u2019d urge you to pick up this book \u2013 and, as its author warns in his stark preface, be terrified. <\/span>Serhii Plokhy is one of those historians whose finger seems to be unerringly on the pulse of current events. Just a year ago, he gave us Nuclear <\/em>Folly, <\/em>a dramatic retelling of when the world came close to nuclear Armageddon during the 1962 Cuban missile crisis. Now in Atoms <\/em>and <\/em>Ashes, <\/em>he takes a truly chilling look at nuclear weaponry\u2019s twin \u2013 nuclear power.<\/p>\n\n

In a series of shocking, hour-by-hour snapshots, he details exactly what happens when nuclear power plants, ostensibly designed for peace and plenty, abruptly decide to go off the rails and melt down, blow up and spew enormous quantities of radioactive dust into the atmosphere. The only story missing here is the one in which the Russians fire high-explosive shells directly at a Ukrainian nuclear power station, and that\u2019s because, by the time Plokhy wrote his last sentence, it hadn\u2019t happened yet.<\/p>\n\n

But the message is there, loud and clear. When humans mess with the guts of creation things will sometimes go wrong \u2013 and occasionally catastrophically. This is, explicitly, a book about accidents, from the lesser-known 1957 Kyshtym meltdown in the USSR to the 2011 explosions at Fukushima\u2019s Daiichi nuclear station in Japan \u2013 an accident that proved it wasn\u2019t only antique, badly built and poorly managed Soviet power stations that went haywire, while also giving the Japanese their third grim experience of nuclear fallout.<\/span><\/p>\n\n

Of course the star performer on Plokhy\u2019s \u201clist of the world\u2019s worst nuclear disasters\u201d is Chernobyl, and as somebody who has written a book about that <\/em>too his chapter is especially gripping, not least with his unsparing eye for irony. So we learn that it was, quite literally, the \u201cgraveyard shift\u201d that first witnessed a massive explosion in the number four reactor during the early hours of 26 April 1986, setting off a chain of events that would lead over time to perhaps 50,000 dead.<\/span><\/p>\n\n

\u201c<\/span>Windscale was Britain\u2019s attempt to lead the nuclear fuel field. Then a fire in one of its piles in 1957 hurled radioactive dust across a chunk of the country\u201d<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n

And the theme continues with the 1979 meltdown at the Three Mile Island plant in Pennsylvania, which led to the evacuation of 144,000 people in what the veteran CBS reporter Walter Cronkite at the time called \u201ca nuclear nightmare\u201d. Here Plokhy doesn\u2019t waste an opportunity to point out that it happened just 12 days after The <\/em>China <\/em>Syndrome, <\/em>an Oscar-nominated movie about a near-nuclear meltdown, hit America\u2019s big screens.<\/p>\n\n

Nor does Plokhy omit our very own homegrown accident at Windscale in Cumbria, whose showpiece power station was Britain\u2019s attempt to lead the nuclear field until a fire in one of its piles in 1957 hurled radioactive dust across a chunk of the country, irradiating food supplies and almost certainly causing cancers for decades. \u201cOh dear,\u201d said one of the engineers when he first spotted the fire raging away inside the reactor, \u201cnow we are in a pickle.\u201d It was a sentence worthy of the best Ealing comedies, except this was no comedy.<\/p>\n\n

With 440 reactors still active around the world supplying 10 per cent of our electricity, the darker realities of playing Prometheus, as Plokhy writes, are still very much with us. All of which makes the case for solar and wind farms more compelling than ever. At least they don\u2019t blow up.<\/p>\n\n

<\/p>\n\n

\n\n

Stephen Walker <\/strong>is the author of Shockwave: Countdown to Hiroshima <\/em>(HarperCollins, new edition, 2020) and Beyond: The Astonishing Story of the First Human in Space <\/em>(William Collins, 2022)<\/p>\n\n

All products were chosen independently by our editorial team. Below is an affiliate link, and we may receive a commission for purchases made. Please read our affiliates FAQ section<\/a> to find out more.<\/p>\n\n

Buy now from Waterstones<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n\n

PICTURE CREDIT: GETTY IMAGES<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

SCIENCE Generating fear STEPHEN WALKER gives a nervous welcome to a history of nuclear power, which focuses on the accidents and the disasters that have plagued the sector Atoms and Ashes: From Bikini Atoll to Fukushima by Serhii Plokhy Allen Lane, 368 pages, \u00a325 Unless most life as we know it has been wiped off 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Generating fear STEPHEN WALKER gives a nervous welcome to a history of nuclear power, which focuses on the accidents and the disasters that have plagued the sector Atoms and Ashes: From Bikini Atoll to Fukushima by Serhii Plokhy Allen Lane, 368 pages, \u00a325 Unless most life as we know it has been wiped 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