Balancing The Nuclear Power Debate
By Alastair Ford
February 08, 2008

Winging its way around the world in electronic form is a selection of quotations from a book called “Power to Save the World – The Truth About Nuclear Power”. The book is by Gwyneth Cravens, but it’s not her or her publishers on a promote that are causing selected extracts to land in the inboxes of journalists and other industry watchers. Rather it’s the enthusiasm of Australian analyst Warwick Grigor of Far East Capital that’s causing the increasing dissemination of Gwyneth Cravens’s views

It’s not often that I find myself recommending a French state-owned industry as the answer to major U.S. problems, but I guess there’s an exception to every rule.

In this case the exception is the French nuclear energy company Areva, which provides about 80 percent of the country’s electricity from 58 nuclear power plants, is building a new generation of reactor that will come on line at Flamanville in 2012, and is exporting its expertise to countries from China to the United Arab Emirates.

The novelist and one-time nuclear skeptic Cravens provides an engaging and unusual travelogue, taking her readers on an excursion through U.S. nuclear facilities and their workings, from the enrichment of fuel through the long-term storage of nuclear waste, regaling them all the while with interesting and pertinent facts about nuclear power at home and abroad.

"Green With (Nuclear) Energy"
November 20, 2007

Start with a novelist and former New Yorker magazine fiction editor living on the East End of Long Island, a sometime antinuclear activist (remember Shoreham?) and a determined organic vegetable gardener who spent her childhood in 1950s New Mexico having atom-bomb nightmares. Team her with another lifelong greenie ...

Editor's Pick for October 30, 2007

Sometimes a convert makes the most ardent missionary. Such may be the case with novelist and science writer Cravens. Initially biased against nuclear energy because of its commonly perceived risks, she changed her mind when introduced to the scientific facts.

Week of November 11

Novelist and science reporter Cravens (The Black Death) begins this journey of discovery “through the Nuclear world” dubious of nuclear power’s safety and utility: “I’d participated in ban-the-bomb rallies” but “never considered the fate of a retired weapon.” Her trip begins with a casual conversation with nuclear physicist Dr. Richard “Rip” Anderson on the hidden warheads being dismantled outside Albuquerque, N.M.; as it turns out, the nuclear “pits” were to be used for fuel in nuclear reactors.

Publication of the American Library Association

As global warming becomes front-page news and the search for sustainable noncarbon energy sources gains momentum, nuclear energy is acquiring new advocates, even among environmentalists. But what about nuclear waste, accidents, and terrorism?