Books about Radioactive from Amazon.com

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Growing up in suburban Detroit, David Hahn was fascinated by science While he was working on his Atomic Energy badge for the Boy Scouts, David’s obsessive attention turned to nuclear energy. Throwing caution to the wind, he plunged into a new project: building a model nuclear reactor in his backyard garden shed.

Posing as a physics professor, David solicited information on reactor design from the U.S. government and from industry experts. Following blueprints he found in an outdated physics textbook, David cobbled together a crude device that threw off toxic levels of radiation. His wholly unsupervised project finally sparked an environmental emergency that put his town’s forty thousand suburbanites at risk. The EPA ended up burying his lab at a radioactive dumpsite in Utah. This offbeat account of ambition and, ultimately, hubris has the narrative energy of a first-rate thriller..
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It is the year 2057, and the last freelance private detective, partnered with an experimental A.I. named Harv, has a new case to solve involving androids, future tech wizards, out-of-control artificial intelligences, and futuristic mayhem..
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On June 26, 1995 the people of Golf Manor, Michigan returned from work to find a federal EPA crew dismantling a potting shed in Patty Hahn's back yard. In subsequent days, the crew, wearing protective suits, carted away the refuse in sealed barrels emblazoned with radiation symbols. The EPA workers refused to disclose what was happening, only offering vague reassurance that everything was ok. Ken Silverstein shows that things in Golf Manor were not, in fact, ok. David Hahn, a 17-year-old aspiring Eagle Scout, had constructed the rudiments of a nuclear breeder reactor in his backyard and had contaminated himself and the immediate area with potentially deadly radioactive material. In his brief, briskly-paced account of the events, Silverstein weaves together science, history, and testimony from David and his family in a tale both frightening and tragic.

For David to get so far, Silverstein shows, he had to be the victim of carelessness and neglect at all levels of society. David Hahn's parents were divorced, and David used the separate households to conceal the magnitude of his work. His school teachers paid little heed when David, nicknamed Glow Boy by fellow students, suggested he was collecting radioactive substances. Most alarmingly, corporations and government agencies blithely supplied David with the materials and information he needed to expand his work to dangerous levels. Interspersed with his account of David, Silverstein exposes the culture of deceit surrounding the history of nuclear power, a culture that easily seduced an aspiring young scientist. David was left with little in the way of mentorship other than such one-sided testaments to the benefits of science as his trusted Golden Book of Chemistry Experiments.

The book, which grew out of Silverstein's 1998 story in Harper's Magazine reads like a suspense novel blended with breezy accounts of America's history with the atom. It is, in some ways, a coda for the nuclear age. In his final pages, Silverstein shows that power production from nuclear reactors has slowly ebbed over the last decades, breeder reactors world-wide have been shut down, and public apprehension has finally out-stripped naïve scientific exuberance for atomic energy. But is the danger truly receding? Surprisingly, The Radioactive Boy Scout does not address any changes in security that have evolved from David's incident. In fact, Silverstein hints that David himself may still be dabbling with radioactive materials. In the post 9/11 era, the prospect is even more frightening. --Patrick O'Kelley.
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Covering radiogenic, radioactive, and stable isotopes, this comprehensive text contains five sections that present fundamentals of atomic physics; dating methods for terrestrial and extraterrestrial rocks by means of radiogenic isotopes; geochemistry of radiogenic isotopes; dating by means of U, Th-series and cosmogenic radionuclides; and the fractionation of the stable isotopes of H, C, N, O, and S, as well as Li, B, Si, and Cl. Additionally, this edition provides:

• Expanded coverage of the U-Pb methods –the most accurate available dating technique
• Applications to the petrogenesis of igneous rocks
• Summaries of the use of isotopic data for study of the oceans
• New examples from the fields of archeology and anthropology
• Radiation-damage methods of dating including fission tracks, thermoluminescence, and electron spin resonance (ESR)
• Information on the dispersal of fission-product radionuclides and the disposal of radioactive waste
• Extensive chapter-by-chapter problems and solutions

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For decades, nuclear testing in America's southwest was shrouded in secrecy, with images gradually made public of mushroom clouds blooming over the desert. Now, another nuclear crisis looms over this region: the storage of tens of thousands of tons of nuclear waste. Tainted Desert maps the nuclear landscapes of the US inter-desert southwest, a land sacrificed to the Cold-War arms race and nuclear energy policy. It not only makes visible the millions of acres that were removed from public access for weapons testing and development--and, more recently, for waste storage--but also reveals the cultural significance of this contaminated land. Valerie Kuletz documents in frightening detail the tragic consequences of these policies on the southwestern land and its native peoples. Consequently, a double exposure emerges of one landscape superimposed upon another: a landscape of national sacrifice over what many Americans understand as a geography of the sacred. After demonstrating how the consequences of nuclear power from the production of weapons and energy have been concentrated in the US inter-desert region, Kuletz then focuses on Yucca Mountain, the proposed permanent repository for high-level nuclear waste. Located in Nevada at the boundary between the Mojave and the lower Great Basin deserts on traditional Western Shoshone and Southern Paiute land, Yucca Mountain illuminates the ways different cultures understand and interact with nature. Kuletz investigates how culture influences both native and scientific representations of nature as well as strategies for managing the relationship between nature and human society. The author draws on interviews with the Native Americans affected by nuclear activity while using mapping strategies, textual analysis and an ethnoecological approach to document the zones of national sacrificial land. Having grown up near a testing center in the Mojave desert, she demonstrates that this is not just a local problem, or even a national one, but a global crisis that affects everyone's backyard..
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The most contaminated nuclear plant in the country, Rocky Flats was an environmental disaster and the site of rampant worker unrest. Although it was estimated that it would take 70 years and $36 billion to clean up and close the facility, something stunning happened. Now on its way to becoming a wildlife refuge, the project is running 60 years ahead of schedule and $30 billion under budget. In "Making the Impossible Possible," Kim Cameron explains how this remarkable performance was achieved -- and how it can be replicated. Using numerous first-hand accounts and public records, Cameron draws a number of leadership guidelines that can be applied to any business. This fascinating and thoroughly researched case study concludes by revealing the ten leadership principles responsible for the Rocky Flats turnaround -- and in doing so, provides a means for other organizations to harness the lessons of this astonishing success..
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Trinity was the first test of technology for a nuclear weapon. It was conducted by the United States on July 16, 1945, at a location 35 miles (56 km) southeast of Socorro, New Mexico, on what is now White Sands Missile Range, headquartered near Alamogordo. Trinity was a test of an implosion-design plutonium bomb. The Fat Man bomb, using the same conceptual design, was dropped on Nagasaki, Japan, a few weeks later. The detonation was equivalent to the explosion of around 20 kilotons of TNT, and is usually considered as the beginning of the Atomic Age.

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