RE: For Ages 10 and up, TMI fiction?

["Jacobus, John (OD/ORS)" <jacobusj@ors.od.nih.gov>]

Jim,

Have you read the book?  This review does not contain a lot of information

on its content, except that it is too ambitious.



-- John



John Jacobus, MS

Certified Health Physicist

3050 Traymore Lane

Bowie, MD  20715-2024



E-mail:  jenday1@email.msn.com (H)      

-----Original Message-----

From: Muckerheide [mailto:muckerheide@MEDIAONE.NET]

Sent: Saturday, November 24, 2001 1:45 PM

To: ans-pie@nuke-ans.org; radsafe@list.vanderbilt.edu

Subject: 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

===========



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)



. . . 

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. 

. . .

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.'' 

. . .

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