Reviewed by Richard N. Cooper, Foreign Affairs
January/February 2008
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.
She also gives due attention to nuclear safety, the disposal of waste, the proliferation of material usable for weapons, and economics. She persuades herself that in the future nuclear power should -- and must -- play a much larger role in power generation (and eventually the production of mobile fuels such as hydrogen), replacing coal as the main power-generating fuel in the interest of avoiding even more pressure on the climate system.
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