Download or read book The Uranium People written by Leona Marshall Libby and published by . This book was released on 1979 with total page 376 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The youngest and only woman member of the original team of scientists who worked on the Manhattan Project recounts the scientific, personal, and ethical problems encountered by those who built the first nuclear reactor.
Download or read book Uranium written by Tom Zoellner and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2009 with total page 360 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A history of the powerful mineral element explores its role as a virtually limitless energy source, its controversial applications as a healing tool and weapon, and the ways in which its reputation has been used to promote war agendas in the middle east.
Download or read book Downwind written by Sarah Alisabeth Fox and published by U of Nebraska Press. This book was released on 2014-11-01 with total page 302 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Downwind is an unflinching tale of the atomic West that reveals the intentional disregard for human and animal life through nuclear testing by the federal government and uranium extraction by mining corporations during and after the Cold War. Sarah Alisabeth Fox highlights the personal cost of nuclear testing and uranium extraction in the American West through extensive interviews with “downwinders,” the Native American and non-Native residents of the Great Basin region affected by nuclear environmental contamination and nuclear-testing fallout. These downwinders tell tales of communities ravaged by cancer epidemics, farmers and ranchers economically ruined by massive crop and animal deaths, and Native miners working in dangerous conditions without proper safety equipment so that the government could surreptitiously study the effects of radiation on humans. In chilling detail Downwind brings to light the stories and concerns of these groups whose voices have been silenced and marginalized for decades in the name of “patriotism” and “national security.” With the renewed boom in mining in the American West, Fox’s look at this hidden history, unearthed from years of field interviews, archival research, and epidemiological studies, is a must-read for every American concerned about the fate of our western lands and communities.
Download or read book Uranium written by Anthony Burke and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2017-07-03 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Uranium, the most atomically unstable natural element on earth, has a unique place in the global geopolitics of resources. It provides energy to millions of people and its isotopes are used to power spacecraft and in nuclear medicine. But it is also at the heart of many of the planet's most deadly threats, including nuclear devastation and radioactive waste. Its mining has caused bitter conflict with indigenous peoples and its testing in nuclear weapons has left a toxic legacy. Yet the nonproliferation regime which aims to phase out nuclear weapons and manage the risks of nuclear energy is at risk of unravelling. In this book, Anthony Burke explores the geopolitical intrigue around uranium and the dilemmas of justice and security to which its development has given rise. The twenty-first century, he cautions, will be a time of reckoning and new reserves of political will must be found to manage the impact of this extraordinary mineral. Only by cooperating to achieve multilateral disarmament and greater international control over nuclear power can we ward off nuclear catastrophe and harness the potential of nuclear energy to help address, rather than create, some of the world's most pressing problems.
Download or read book The Navajo People and Uranium Mining written by Doug Brugge and published by UNM Press. This book was released on 2007 with total page 236 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Based on statements given to the Navajo Uranium Miner Oral History and Photography Project, this revealing book assesses the effects of uranium mining on the reservation beginning in the 1940s.
Download or read book Yellow Dirt written by Judy Pasternak and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2011-07-05 with total page 338 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Tells the story of uranium mining on the Navajo reservation and its legacy of sickness and government neglect, documenting one of the darker chapters in 20th century American history. --From publisher description.
Download or read book Full Body Burden written by Kristen Iversen and published by Crown. This book was released on 2013-06-04 with total page 434 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “An intimate and deeply human memoir that shows why we should all be concerned about nuclear safety, and the dangers of ignoring science in the name of national security.”—Rebecca Skloot, #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks A shocking account of the government’s attempt to conceal the effects of the toxic waste released by a secret nuclear weapons plant in Colorado and a community’s vain search for justice—soon to be a feature documentary Kristen Iversen grew up in a small Colorado town close to Rocky Flats, a secret nuclear weapons plant once designated "the most contaminated site in America." Full Body Burden is the story of a childhood and adolescence in the shadow of the Cold War, in a landscape at once startlingly beautiful and--unknown to those who lived there--tainted with invisible yet deadly particles of plutonium. It's also a book about the destructive power of secrets--both family and government. Her father's hidden liquor bottles, the strange cancers in children in the neighborhood, the truth about what was made at Rocky Flats--best not to inquire too deeply into any of it. But as Iversen grew older, she began to ask questions and discovered some disturbing realities. Based on extensive interviews, FBI and EPA documents, and class-action testimony, this taut, beautifully written book is both captivating and unnerving.
Download or read book Metal of Dishonor Depleted Uranium written by and published by . This book was released on 1999 with total page 300 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The drastic health and environmental consequences of a new generation of radioactive weapons, Depleted Uranium (DU), currently being used in U.S.-waged wars are discussed in these essays. This new kind of nuclear war is examined alongside the effects on Vietnam and Gulf war veterans and the indigenous people on whose land these weapons are being tested. Among the issues covered are the collaborative military and media cover-up of DU, the government's denial of DU's toxic effects, uranium development on Native American land, nuclear testing on the Marshall Islands, and radioactive residue in the Middle East. Contributors include Ramsey Clark, Pat Broudy, and Helen Caldicott. Official government documents on DU and its effects and charts illustrating where DU is tested and stored in the United States are included for further examination.
Download or read book The Transuranium People written by Darleane C Hoffman and published by World Scientific. This book was released on 2000-01-21 with total page 564 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this highly interesting book, three pioneering investigators provide an account of the discovery and investigation of the nuclear and chemical properties of the twenty presently known transuranium elements. The neutron irradiation of uranium led to the discovery of nuclear fission in 1938 and then to the first transuranium element, neptunium (atomic number 93), in 1940. Plutonium (94) quickly followed and the next nine elements completed the actinide series by 1961. Investigation of the chemical properties of the actinides was followed more recently by chemical studies of the first three transactinides — rutherfordium (104), hahnium (105), and seaborgium (106). Recent discoveries have extended the known elements to 112. Contents: Neptunium and PlutoniumThe Plutonium PeopleAmericium and CuriumBerkelium and CaliforniumThe “Big Bang”: Discovery of Einsteinium and FermiumMendeleviumNobelium and LawrenciumRutherfordium and HahniumSeaborgiumBohrium (107), Hassium (108), and Meitnerium (109)Elements 110, 111, and 112Naming Controversies and the Transfermium Working GroupSearches for the Superheavy ElementsReflections and Predictions Readership: Undergraduates and graduates in nuclear physics, radiochemistry and the general readers. Keywords:Transuranium People;Neptunium;Transactinides;Rutherfordium;Hahnium;SeaborgiumReviews:“'The Transuranium People' is a splendid tribute to those who have made the past 60 years a golden age for discovering new elements.”C&EN
Download or read book The Girls of Atomic City written by Denise Kiernan and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2014-03-11 with total page 416 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Looks at the contributions of the thousands of women who worked at a secret uranium-enriching facility in Oak Ridge, Tennessee during World War II.
Download or read book If You Poison Us written by Peter H. Eichstaedt and published by Museum of NM Press/Red Crane Books. This book was released on 1994 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "The untold story of the Native Americans who were the patriotic but unwitting victims of America's quest for nuclear superiority during the Cold War." Stewart L. Udall, former Secretary of the Interior (from the back cover).
Download or read book Wastelanding written by Traci Brynne Voyles and published by U of Minnesota Press. This book was released on 2015-05-15 with total page 333 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Wastelanding tells the history of the uranium industry on Navajo land in the U.S. Southwest, asking why certain landscapes and the peoples who inhabit them come to be targeted for disproportionate exposure to environmental harm. Uranium mines and mills on the Navajo Nation land have long supplied U.S. nuclear weapons and energy programs. By 1942, mines on the reservation were the main source of uranium for the top-secret Manhattan Project. Today, the Navajo Nation is home to more than a thousand abandoned uranium sites. Radiation-related diseases are endemic, claiming the health and lives of former miners and nonminers alike. Traci Brynne Voyles argues that the presence of uranium mining on Diné (Navajo) land constitutes a clear case of environmental racism. Looking at discursive constructions of landscapes, she explores how environmental racism develops over time. For Voyles, the “wasteland,” where toxic materials are excavated, exploited, and dumped, is both a racial and a spatial signifier that renders an environment and the bodies that inhabit it pollutable. Because environmental inequality is inherent in the way industrialism operates, the wasteland is the “other” through which modern industrialism is established. In examining the history of wastelanding in Navajo country, Voyles provides “an environmental justice history” of uranium mining, revealing how just as “civilization” has been defined on and through “savagery,” environmental privilege is produced by portraying other landscapes as marginal, worthless, and pollutable.
Download or read book Being Nuclear written by Gabrielle Hecht and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2012-03-02 with total page 475 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The hidden history of African uranium and what it means—for a state, an object, an industry, a workplace—to be “nuclear.” Uranium from Africa has long been a major source of fuel for nuclear power and atomic weapons, including the bomb dropped on Hiroshima. In 2003, after the infamous “yellow cake from Niger,” Africa suddenly became notorious as a source of uranium, a component of nuclear weapons. But did that admit Niger, or any of Africa's other uranium-producing countries, to the select society of nuclear states? Does uranium itself count as a nuclear thing? In this book, Gabrielle Hecht lucidly probes the question of what it means for something—a state, an object, an industry, a workplace—to be “nuclear.” Hecht shows that questions about being nuclear—a state that she calls “nuclearity”—lie at the heart of today's global nuclear order and the relationships between “developing nations” (often former colonies) and “nuclear powers” (often former colonizers). Hecht enters African nuclear worlds, focusing on miners and the occupational hazard of radiation exposure. Could a mine be a nuclear workplace if (as in some South African mines) its radiation levels went undetected and unmeasured? With this book, Hecht is the first to put Africa in the nuclear world, and the nuclear world in Africa. By doing so, she remakes our understanding of the nuclear age.
Download or read book Uranium Frenzy written by Raye Ringholz and published by University Press of Colorado. This book was released on 2002-08-15 with total page 517 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Now expanded to include the story of nuclear testing and its consequences, Uranium Frenzy has become the classic account of the uranium rush that gripped the Colorado Plateau region in the 1950s. Instigated by the U.S. government's need for uranium to fuel its growing atomic weapons program, stimulated by Charlie Steen's lucrative Mi Vida strike in 1952, manned by rookie prospectors from all walks of life, and driven to a fever pitch by penny stock promotions, the boom created a colorful era in the Four Corners region and Salt Lake City (where the stock frenzy was centered) but ultimately went bust. The thrill of those exciting times and the good fortune of some of the miners were countered by the darker aspects of uranium and its uses. Miners were not well informed regarding the dangers of radioactive decay products. Neither the government nor anyone else expended much effort educating them or protecting their health and safety. The effects of exposure to radiation in poorly ventilated mines appeared over time.
Download or read book Past Climates written by Leona Marshall Libby and published by University of Texas Press. This book was released on 1983-01-01 with total page 158 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Leona Marshall Libby was a pioneer in modern climatic research, a field that gained great impetus in the late twentieth century because of the promise it holds for predicting future climatic trends. Libby’s work led to remarkable new procedures for investigating long-term changes in precipitation and temperature and thereby greatly expanding our knowledge of past climates. As Professor Rainer Berger writes in his foreword: “In recent years, tree ring–based temperature data have been collected which go far beyond the records available to historians. These data can be analyzed by Fourier transforms which identify certain periodicities. . . . Climatic changes detected by tree rings have been checked against historic records. . . . The correspondence is astonishing. . . . “At present weather forecasting is becoming more accurate for periods on the order of days, weeks, and months. Climatic prognoses have also been attempted for very long times of tens of thousands of years. But the intermediate range in the decades and centuries has so far been an enigma. It is here where tree ring thermometry plays its trump cards. “. . . Its potential is enormous in assessing worldwide crop yields, water inventory, heating requirements, stockpiling policies, and construction planning as well as political and military prospects.”
Download or read book We Made Uranium written by Leila Sales and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2019-04-16 with total page 243 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Item #176: A fire drill. No, not an exercise in which occupants of a building practice leaving the building safely. A drill which safely emits a bit of fire, the approximate shape and size of a drill bit. Item #74: Enter a lecture class in street clothes. Receive loud phone call. Shout “I NEED TO GO, THE CITY NEEDS ME!” Remove street clothes to reveal superhero apparel. Run out for the good of the land. Item #293: Hypnotizing a chicken seems easy, but if the Wikipedia article on the practice is to be believed, debate on the optimal method is heated. Do some trials on a real chicken and submit a report . . . for science of course. Item #234: A walking, working, people-powered but preferably wind-powered Strandbeest. Item #188: Fattest cat. Points per pound. The University of Chicago’s annual Scavenger Hunt (or “Scav”) is one of the most storied college traditions in America. Every year, teams of hundreds of competitors scramble over four days to complete roughly 350 challenges. The tasks range from moments of silliness to 1,000-mile road trips, and they call on participants to fully embrace the absurd. For students it is a rite of passage, and for the surrounding community it is a chance to glimpse the lighter side of a notoriously serious university. We Made Uranium! shares the stories behind Scav, told by participants and judges from the hunt’s more than thirty-year history. The twenty-three essays range from the shockingly successful (a genuine, if minuscule, nuclear reaction created in a dorm room) to the endearing failures (it’s hard to build a carwash for a train), and all the chicken hypnotisms and permanent tattoos in between. Taken together, they show how a scavenger hunt once meant for blowing off steam before finals has grown into one of the most outrageous annual traditions at any university. The tales told here are absurd, uplifting, hilarious, and thought-provoking—and they are all one hundred percent true.
Download or read book Nuclear Power Is Not the Answer written by Helen Caldicott and published by ReadHowYouWant.com. This book was released on 2010-10-29 with total page 330 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The world-renowned antinuclear activist's expertly argued(The Guardian) case against nuclear energy. In a world torn apart by wars over oil, politicians have increasingly begun to look for alternative energy sources and their leading choice is nuclear energy. Among the myths that have been spread over the years about nuclear-powered electricity are that it does not cause global warming or pollution, that it is inexpensive, and that it is safe. Helen Caldicott's look at the actual costs and environmental consequences of nuclear energy belies the incessant barrage of nuclear industry propaganda. Caldicott reveals truths, Martin Sheen has said, that confirm we must take positive action now if we are to make a difference. In fact, nuclear power contributes to global warming; the true cost of nuclear power is prohibitive, with taxpayers picking up most of the tab; there's simply not enough uranium in the world to sustain nuclear power over the long term; and the potential for a catastrophic accident or a terrorist attack far outweighs any benefits. Concluding chapters detail alternative sustainable energy sources that are the key to a clean, green future.
