Publication Laka-library:
Nuclear Power New Edition
| Author | W.Patterson |
 |
6-01-0-00-153.pdf |
| Date | 1983 |
| Classification | 6.01.0.00/153 (GENERAL) |
| Remarks | Available for download at www.waltpatterson.org |
| Front | 
|
From the publication:
Preface to the first edition
Nuclear reactors are fascinating. They are the heart of the technology which may shape
the world of our near future, or may obliterate it. Born amid the tightest of military
security during the Second World War, nuclear reactors have always impressed the
layman as esoteric, fantastic entities, beyond ordinary comprehension. Such an
impression is unwarranted. As we balance on the threshold of total commitment to a
nuclear pathway it is vitally important that nuclear policy be based on broad public
understanding - of nuclear technology, of its applications, and of its implications.
Nuclear physics and nuclear engineering are, to be sure, specialized subjects, dealing in
phenomena which sometimes seem almost Carrollian in their unexpectedness. But the
essential features of nuclear reactors have changed very little in the four decades of their
existence; what has changed is their size, and their context. The present book is an
attempt to describe the reactors themselves - and to describe, too, the effect they have
had, and are having, on the world in which we live. Of necessity the description is one
man's view of an ever more controversial nexus of issues. It will strike some as unduly
pessimistic about nuclear prospects, and others as entirely too absorbed in a subject from
which they instinctively recoil. It is therefore appropriate to begin with a warning: in
nuclear matters never take any one viewpoint as gospel, including this one. For those who
wish to pursue questions further I have included in Appendix C a lengthy list of
additional sources, annotated to indicate - once again - one man's view of their virtues
and shortcomings.
In the course of my own involvement with nuclear matters I have been fortunate to
encounter many other viewpoints against which to measure my own, some in print and
some in person. The staff of the United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority have been
unfailingly helpful to me in spite of our frequently diverging opinions. I should
particularly like to thank Ron Truscott and his colleagues of the Public Relations section
and Mrs Loma Arnold of the Archives, who made available to me advance copies of
Professor Margaret Gowing's superb official history Independence and Deterrence at a
crucial stage in my own research.
The now sub-divided United States Atomic Energy Commission has supplied me with
many useful documents, as have the International Atomic Energy Agency and the OECD
Nuclear Energy Agency, the last through the good offices of Bruce Adkins, to whom
again my thanks. I have made extensive use of the works of Dr Samuel Glasstone, the
late Dr Theos Thompson and Dr J. G. Beckerley, the late Dr Kenneth Jay, my friend and
colleague Sheldon Novick, Dr J. E. Coggle, Dr Tom Cochran, Dr John Goftna n, Dr
Arthur Tamplin, Dr John Holdren, Richard Lewis, John McPhee, Norman Moss, Dr Peter
Metzger, Roger Rapoport, Ted Taylor and Mason Willrich, among many; to all of them
my thanks. The publications of the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, the
Pugwash Conferences, the International Commission on Radiological Protection, the
National Radiological Protection Board and the Union of Concerned Scientists, and the
pages of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Science, Environment, Energy Policy and
Nuclear Engineering International have yielded much valuable material, as has the
Weekly Energy Report, to whose editor and publisher Llewellyn King my thanks.
Many of my journalist colleagues have for many months carried on with me an unending
and fruitful colloquy, not only about nuclear affairs but about their context in energy and
social policy overall. I expect they will let me know what they think of my effort, in
similarly blunt language: in anticipation my thanks to the lot of them, especially to the
staff of the New Scientist, who encounter my opinions sooner and more often than most.
Even closer to home my colleagues in Friends of the Earth International, without whose
active participation this book neither would nor could have been written. Brice Lalonde
and Pierre Samuel of Les Amis de la Terre in France, Lennart Daleus of Jordens Vdnner
in Sweden, Brian Hurley of FOE Ireland, Holger Strohm of Die Freunde der Erde in
West Germany, Kitty Pegels of Vereniging Milieudefensie in the Netherlands, Jim
Harding of FOE Inc. in the USA, and many other Friends have provided an international
link-up of growing strength. In Britain Dr Peter Chapman of the Open University and
Gerald Leach of the International Institute for Environanent and Development have
contributed provocative insights and stimulating debate. My Friends of the FOE Ltd
office in London have put up with my absence from the team for some weeks without
complaint, carrying for me my share of the load. Finally, and most particularly, my
warmest thanks to Dr John Price and to Amory Lovins, with whom it is an exhausting
pleasure to work, and without whom I might as well stick to cultivating my broccoli.
I am grateful to Peter Wright of Penguin Books for the opportunity to amplify fourfold an
earlier version of this text. On the home front my thanks and best wishes to Mrs Sue
Hunter, who has toiled nobly to turn a tangled typescript into intelligible copy. Lastly to
my beloved wife Cleone, who put up with three months of me lying obsessively awake at
four in the morning: I promise that I shall never again write about terrorists with nuclear
weapons the day before Christmas Eve. I hope.
Walt Patterson
31 December 1974