For Ages 10 and up, TMI fiction?

[Muckerheide <muckerheide@MEDIAONE.NET>]

Title: For Ages 10 and up, TMI fiction?

Note: The reviewer is/was affiliated with the anti-nuke PSR!?  and yet is the "moderate" here?  :-)

Is anyone interested in obtaining and preparing a critique?  Comments on Amazon?

Regards, Jim
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NY Times Book Review

November 18, 2001

Power Failure

By H. JACK GEIGER

MELTDOWN
A Race Against Nuclear Disaster at Three Mile Island: A Reporter's Story.

By Wilborn Hampton.

Illustrated. 104 pp. Cambridge, Mass.: Candlewick Press. $19.99. (Ages 10 and up)


As every parent of young children surely knows by now, among the consequences of recent terrorist attacks, both physical and biological, are confusion, fear, profound insecurity and even depression among youngsters as they struggle to make sense of what is incomprehensible to them. Few stories are more poignant than the account of the New York first grader, glimpsing bodies falling from the flaming World Trade Center, who cried out, ''Look, teacher, the birds are on fire!'' Mental health organizations -- and even the federal Department of Health and Human Services -- have rushed to provide counseling and advice to parents and teachers on how to respond. For older children and pre-teenagers, an honest and clear presentation of both the facts and the uncertainties, together with reasoned reassurance, is a recommended path to the restoration of trust and the mastery of fear. 


That is, in a sense, what Wilborn Hampton has attempted in ''Meltdown,'' his account of a potential disaster, similarly accompanied by early incomprehension, continuing uncertainty, scientific confusion and fear of a seemingly invisible and unpredictable but terrifying threat. 


The accident at the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant in Middletown, Pa., took place in 1979. Hampton, then a United Press International reporter covering the accident and the subsequent crisis (and now an editor at The New York Times Book Review), sets out to explain what happened, from beginning to end. He does so not by writing a retrospectively objective history. Instead, the reader views Three Mile Island through his reporter's eyes, as he gives a day-by-day account of his attendance at unsatisfying press conferences by nuclear engineers and government officials, his visits to nearby communities turned into ghost towns by the flight of panicked residents, his images of the looming cooling towers of the plant and his own struggle to understand the threat. 


Hampton used this technique with great success in his ''Kennedy Assassinated! The World Mourns: A Reporter's Story.'' It is at least partly successful here because, wisely, he buttresses the narrative account with diagrams and drawings of the basic structures of nuclear power plants, the accident itself and the consequent threats. 


In reasonably simple terms, he attempts to explain the basics of radiation and its effects on humans, the risks of the hydrogen bubble that formed within the reactor and the threat of an explosion and fire, and the nature and potential devastation of the worst-case scenario, a nuclear meltdown, a ''China Syndrome.'' The day-by-day approach draws a vivid picture -- the reader sees it as Hampton saw it -- of a developing crisis, the frenzied efforts to understand and control it, and its successful resolution. 


Three Mile Island was an important, even historic, event, and there are far too few efforts as good as this one to engage older children in a serious but lively explanation of what happened, why it mattered and its present significance. Not the least of this book's rewards is the implicit message that dangerous possibilities can be controlled by a combination of expertise, bravery, wisdom and just plain muddling through. That has some contemporary relevance. 


Because Three Mile Island was a much more complex story, scientifically and in its real physical threat to large populations, than was the Kennedy assassination, there are some limitations in Hampton's account. The diagrams purporting to explain how a nuclear power plant works, essential to a real understanding of the accident, are likely to be unfathomable to many young readers; there are far clearer alternatives already in print. Terms like ''radioactive steam'' and ''containment vessel'' appear frequently without sufficient definition. An important later analysis of the accident, which showed that the risks were greatest at a time when the authorities were most reassuring, and much less during the time (the hydrogen bubble) of their greatest fear, is not included. Backyard fallout shelters and schoolchildren's ''duck and cover'' exercises are described with no mention of their fundamental absurdity. 


A more important problem is conceptual. ''Meltdown'' begins with the first atomic bombs at Alamagordo, Hiroshima and Nagasaki and ends with Chernobyl, a historical sequence that, despite careful but very brief disclaimers, may obscure for young readers the fact that these are vastly different events, operating through entirely different mechanisms. A nuclear power plant, even one in trouble, is not like a bomb. 


There is no operating nuclear plant in the United States with a vulnerable design like that of Chernobyl. A triptych of photographs on the back cover only reinforces this notion. There are real and important controversies over nuclear power, which Hampton refers to often, but they do not require such frightening statements as ''After all, no one wants to carry a Geiger counter on every trip to the grocery store just to measure the radiation in the food.'' Or even worse, ''And no one wants to increase the possibility that children might be born with horrible deformities or face early death from cancer.'' 


It is no fault of either author or publisher that ''Meltdown'' arrives at such a bad time of national -- and children's -- anxiety. But what might have been read as accurate and dispassionate statements, even as a reassuring demonstration that a crisis can be controlled, now have an eerie similarity to current events. We are told early on that with the unleashing of the atom ''the world became a much more terrifying place.'' There are frequent references to invisible terror, and Hampton (though meaning only to refer to Three Mile Island and Chernobyl) writes of people around the world who live with fears never far from their minds. These are legitimate aspects of the story that unfolded more than two decades ago, but some parents will have to make a judgment call, to decide whether these descriptions might be inadvertent reinforcements of the contemporary fears of a child who is already burdened by today's headlines. 


H. Jack Geiger is a founding member and former president of Physicians for Social Responsibility.