Atoms and Ashes: A Global History of Nuclear Disasters by Serhii Plokhy

Atoms and Ashes: A Global History of Nuclear Disasters Reviews

• 
  BookStarRaven

  Quick Take: Nuclear power is terrifying and deadly as proven by the disasters that have occurred throughout history.
  
  I’m going to file this book under “things I wish I never learned.” Atoms and Ashes by Serhii Plokhy is a historical accounting of nuclear accidents. I was disturbed hearing how destructive nuclear power and fallout actually is. Many of the caretakers of nuclear energy in the accidents cared more about covering up the accident than warning the residents who would be affected.
  
  1. Castle Bravo (US) - thermonuclear weapon tests - US military leaders ignored weather readings that would indicate the test would not go as planned. Several surrounding islands were radiated and residents had lifelong health problems due to exposure. A Japanese fishing boat was radiated leading to the death of one sailor and health problems for the rest including all the fish.
  2. Kyshtym (Russia) - Plutonium-Processing Plant - Scientists dumped radioactive waste that thousands of people used as drinking water and a food resource. Eventually a nuclear waste system was devised but exploded in 1957 radiating everyone in the vicinity.
  3. Windscale (England)- Nuclear Reactors - operators made a mistake which caused a fire in the core. It took hours to get the fire under control during which radiation spewed out of cooling towers into the air.
  4. 3 Mile Island (US) - Nuclear Power Plant - calamity of errors so ridiculous It would be funny if it wasn’t so terrifying leads to a near core meltdown at power the plant.
  5. Chernobyl (Ukraine) - Nuclear Power Plant - Lack of safety culture and untrained staff leads to core meltdown and death of at least 30 people.
  6. Fukushima (Japan) - Nuclear Power Plant - Tsunami disables the cooling power supply and causes core melt down.
  
  To me, this book shows that science and scientific research is its own type of power and should not be given into the hands of just anyone. Especially when working with such possibly harmful substances, the highest ethical standard should be required.
  
  I would have liked to have had an early chapter about the basics of nuclear energy and the development of nuclear power. While I know bits and pieces, I knew little enough that when the book started, I felt like I missed something or started in the middle of the book instead of the beginning. I also agree with other reviews that it doesn’t make sense that so many different measurement types were used for measuring radiation. It made reading radiation numbers basically meaningless.
  
  I would recommend this book to anyone interested in the history of nuclear power.
  
  Rating: 4/5
  Genre: Non-Fiction/History
  
• 
  Hadrian

  Oh dear, now we are in a pickle.
  Technician at Windscale Piles, 1957
  
  A collection of six short chapters on various nuclear disasters, starting with the Castle Bravo test in 1954 and continuing to the Fukushima incident in 2011. The stories are told well, and Plokhy's use of Russian-language sources contributes to the narrative in studies about Kyshtym and Chernobyl.
  
  Plokhy asserts that the risk of dramatic accidents will ultimately impact their later use and cleaner energy more generally, but I have to admit as a layman I'm not entirely convinced - I see these incidents as the result of novel weapons tests, rushed construction, or regulatory capture. But accidents tend to linger in the public memory, and the slow consequences of the alternatives are just like the parable of boiling frogs.
• 
  Bagus

  In
  How to Avoid a Climate Disaster: The Solutions We Have and the Breakthroughs We Need,
  Bill Gates suggested the use of nuclear energy as one of the alternative sources of energy to reach net-zero. However,
  Serhii Plokhy’s latest book made me question the wisdom of utilising nuclear energy to generate civilian electricity requirements amidst the possibilities of nuclear accidents. The statistics of nuclear accidents do not sound promising. Between 1952 and 2009, there have been around 99 (military and civilian) recorded nuclear power plant accidents, a few of which are highlighted in this book. This book is as engaging as Mr Plokhy’s previous nuclear-related book
  Nuclear Folly: A New History of the Cuban Missile Crisis, yet this one focuses more on documenting the sequences of events as well as on how both the governments and nuclear establishments alike mitigated the nuclear accidents, mostly related to nuclear power plants, namely: Castle Bravo (the US, 1954), Kyshtym (former USSR – now Russia, 1957), Windscale (England, 1957), Three Mile Island (the US, 1979), Chernobyl (former USSR – now Ukraine, 1986), and Fukushima Daichii (Japan, 2011).
  
  Compared to Mr Plokhy’s previous book, this one is more technical with less emphasis on the political dimensions of the crisis. Honestly, I got sleepy in some parts as the technical aspects being discussed are too exhaustive. But after reading the afterwords and deriving from my experience dealing with nuclear regulatory bodies, I gather that it remains a challenge to this day to align the policies of the scientists at the nuclear regulatory bodies with the political tracks of the government. When dealing with a crisis such as a nuclear accident, oftentimes the crisis would involve not only the country where the accident took place but also neighbouring countries as well. Governments often responded to the crisis by coverup or downplaying the issue in face of international prestige and protecting national interests, or in the case of the Three Mile Island accident, the media played a role in stirring fear among the public. The scientists do not know how to communicate effectively to the public, whereas the politicians oftentimes do not understand the gravity of the crisis and ask the scientists to do the impossible, except for Jimmy Carter when dealing with the Three Mile Island accident as he had extensive technical nuclear experience.
  
  The premise is quite straightforward. There are two questions asked by Mr Plokhy through his retelling. The first question would be to ask us to rethink the sustainability and the impact of relying on nuclear energy to fulfil our energy demands. There are many alternative options to fossil fuels, but the main challenge remains the economics of scale to adopt them by larger masses, i.e., to make them economically viable. The development of nuclear energy is mostly handled by governmental institutions as the proponents, with limited involvement of private companies, making safety compliance – in theory – easier to regulate and the costs are mostly borne by taxpayer money. 178 states already concluded the safeguard agreements by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) as of today. Yet it didn’t rule out nuclear accidents. In most cases, nuclear accidents were blamed on human errors (personnel’s negligence of safety requirements) or bad designs of the reactors (such was the case of the RBMK reactor model built in the former USSR). However, there were various factors at play contributing to nuclear accidents. There is no single magic wand to rule out nuclear accidents.
  
  Human errors often are the result of external pressures, such as the pressure to build a hydrogen bomb during the Castle Bravo incident, or the expectations to fulfil the electricity demand in the case of Chernobyl accident. Whereas, the different types of nuclear reactors and the high stake of national interests also resulted in the delay in mitigating the crisis, which means coordinated international responses are unlikely to happen. The Chernobyl accident, for example, only got its publication by the Soviet authorities after the Swedish authorities noticed an abnormal amount of radiation in their territories and reported the case to the IAEA. The national interests at stake by the Soviet government, both to maintain prestige as a nuclear superpower in Cold War rivalries and to assure the control of information over their citizens, resulted in bad press handlings and late actions on the government establishments to form coordinated responses. Yet many developments also took place following nuclear accidents, such as the requirement to only perform nuclear tests underground as opposed to the atmospheric test to prevent radiation fallout after the accident of Castle Bravo, as well as the adoption in 1986 of the Convention on Early Notification of a Nuclear Accident following the Chernobyl accident.
  
  Due to the international nature of most nuclear accidents, I agree with Mr Plokhy’s assessment that most politicians and diplomats should be aware of the gravity of the issue and there should be coordinated responses from both nuclear regulatory bodies and the political tracks of government authorities. Despite the implementation of various safeguards, there are still risks that could trigger nuclear accidents outside of the technical dimensions, i.e. political, economic, and social pressures. Nuclear energy is often associated with danger since its first implementation was to bomb the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Japan, and it’s true that nuclear energy is dangerous. But now we also have the pressing issue of climate change which has been forcing us to find alternative energy sources to replace fossil fuels, which is also true. If I have to say a thing that I don’t like about this book, it put too much emphasis on retelling the accidents rather than providing analysis on how the accidents could be relevant to the present circumstances. The afterword, despite its short length, is actually more interesting and insightful rather than the retelling of the six nuclear accidents.
  
  Reviewed from an electronic advance reading copy provided by the publisher through NetGalley.
• 
  Steven Z.

  Recent newspaper headlines and reports on cable news have pointed to the threat of a nuclear disaster in the war in Ukraine. It appears that the Russians have seized the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant, the largest in Europe. They have forced Ukrainians to operate the massive complex and have turned it into a military base to fire missiles at enemy positions. The Russians know full well that using the plant as a “shield” would preclude the Ukrainian army from firing its own missiles at the plant or even trying to retake it. Western powers have requested that the International Atomic Energy Commission investigate, and finally after obfuscating for days the Kremlin has agreed to let inspectors into the plant today. As the situation evolves it has placed Ukraine, Europe, and even Russia in a precarious position if a nuclear accident occurs.
  
  In this environment Serhii Plokhy, the author of numerous historical works including THE GATES OF EUROPE: A HISTORY OF UKRAINE, LOST KINGDOM: THE QUEST FOR EMPIRE AND THE MAKING OF THE RUSSIAN NATION and THE LAST EMPIRE: THE FINAL DAYS OF THE SOVIET UNION has authored a timely narrative in his latest work, ATOMS AND ASHES: A GLOBAL HISTORY OF NUCLEAR DISASTERS.
  
  Plokhy, the Director of the Ukrainian Research Institute at Harvard University examines the dramatic history of Three Mile Island, the Chernobyl disaster, and most recently the Fukushima catastrophe in addition to three others. In so doing Plokhy has provided careful and informative details of each event discussed zeroing in on the planning of nuclear tests and building of nuclear reactors, their implementation, the disasters that evolved, and concludes with a telling analysis of who was responsible. Today a debate exists over the utility of solar and wind technology. As this debate rages, Plokhy takes a fresh look at the history of nuclear accidents trying to understand why they have occurred, how impactful they were, and what we can learn from each event.
  
  Plokhy states from the outset that he “examines not only the actions and omissions of those directly involved, but also the ideologies, politics, and cultures that contributed to the disasters.” After each disaster, a commission was created to examine what occurred and what steps could be taken to prevent future accidents. The problem is that these accidents keep happening and Plokhy tries to lay out the process and offers suggestions to maintain safety for all of humanity.
  
  One of the strengths of Plokhy’s remarkable narrative is explaining the scientific information associated with nuclear testing, the quest to build hydrogen bombs, the development of nuclear power programs, and the catastrophes involved in a clear and concise manner that allows the laymen the ability to understand what normally very complex information is. The author begins his presentation with a discussion of American nuclear testing in the South Pacific at the Bikini Atoll in March 1954. Plokhy points out that nuclear testing in the 1950s was very dangerous no matter what governments said. Scientists had little control over the power of explosions, the direction of wind at various levels of the atmosphere, and which direction fallout might travel. The events of March 1954 involving “Operation Castle Bravo” were no exception particularly once American officials realized that their testing had gone awry there were no contingency plans for evacuations and the weather forecast relied upon was incorrect, despite these “warnings” they continued with further testing even though the first did not go as planned. Of course, the American Atomic Energy Commission investigated and tried to reassure everyone there was nothing to worry about, a common theme in all incidents. Further, secrecy and the need to keep as much information from the public and adversaries in the dark as to what occurred also dominates each incident. In Castle Brava, many islanders felt they were “guinea pigs” for human radiation experiments and the American response was to throw money at them to deal with medical, social, and economic issues that beset survivors. Problems that emerged included the possibility of future cancers, irradiated food sources, and retarding the growth of children.
  
  Nuclear events in the Soviet Union seem to dominate Plokhy’s narrative. First, the Kyshtym accidents, and the meltdown at Chernobyl. In both cases even though the events are 42 years apart the same Soviet scientists had tremendous impact. Nikolai Dollezhal developed a model of a graphite-moderated and water cooled reactor first used in Hanford, WA in 1944. However, Dollezhal along with his colleagues changed the design of the reactor, impacting the future of the Soviet nuclear program and later nuclear industry which became a contributing factor to the Chernobyl disaster. Plokhy takes the reader inside the Maiak nuclear complex and the repeated accidents between 1950 and 1955. He carefully explains what went wrong and the mistakes those in charge made as an explosion at the complex created what one witness described as a “radioactive northern lights.” The key here and Chernobyl in March and April 1986 were nuclear reactor design issues and who would be “blamed” for what transpired in both instances.
  
  “Blame” was the game that was part of the Soviet managerial culture which kicked in immediately in both cases. Scapegoats were needed as upper management knew how to play the game and escape responsibility. Interestingly Yefim Slavsky, the former chief engineer at the complex will reappear at Chernobyl over 40 years later. Secrecy dominated at Maiak as Lavrenti Beria, in charge of developing a hydrogen bomb to match that of the United States pressured the Soviet scientific community to deliver a nuclear device. In 1986, Mikhail Gorbachev took his time in dealing with the reactor meltdown looking for scapegoats which of course centered on operators and engineers at the site. The Cold War dominated 1986 as it had in 1954 and Gorbachev and his cohorts kept information from his domestic audience and the international community which were desperate for information as evidence of radiation began to permeate the atmosphere across Europe. Authorities saw no reason to publicize what occurred as “radiation was harmful but invisible,” and one could pretend nothing happened – of course until an explosion occurred as in Chernobyl; which blew off the protective cover over one of the reactors.
  
  Anglo-American relations play an interesting role in at least one nuclear accident. British Prime Minister Harold MacMillan desperately sought to maintain the United Kingdom as a major power. Since the passage in Congress of MacMahon Act in 1946 the United States was no longer allowed to share nuclear secrets with the British, therefore London had to go it alone in developing a hydrogen bomb to show the US that they were worthy of cooperating on nuclear issues. In 1957, fresh from the disaster of the Suez War and the collapse of the Eden government, MacMillan pressured British nuclear scientists to develop and test a hydrogen bomb. At first, the bomb appeared to have had a successful test at Winscale, the US Congress rescinded the MacMahon Act, and MacMillan seemed to have implemented a successful strategy. However, when it appeared that one of the reactors caught fire and was leaking radiation, MacMillan kept it quiet as possible so as not to endanger nuclear cooperation with Washington. As in Kyshtym, Chernobyl, Bikinii Atoll, radiation levels in food and milk made it difficult to keep the accident from the public. Plokhy correctly reminds us that Cold War pressure on the US and United Kingdom dominated the period as on October 4, 1957, the Russians successfully launched Sputnik causing fears of a nuclear armed missile with a warhead reigning down on them.
  
  The US had its own disaster on March 27, 1979 ,with the accident at Three Mile Island in central Pennsylvania. The event which saw a meltdown of a nuclear reactor was difficult to accept by American leaders, because of all the safeguards built into the system. As in all cases contradictory information dominated. In this case Metropolitan-Eddison who owned the complex, Lt. Governor William Scranton III, the point man for Governor Richard Thornburg, and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission could not agree on what had occurred and how dangerous the situation was. I remember standing outside my house in Northern Virginia testing which way the wind was blowing once the accident went public. The final report heavily influenced by Navy Captain Ronald Eytchison who was the only member of the investigating committee with extensive nuclear knowledge blamed the accident on human error, not simple equipment failure. The problem was that a reactor at the Davis Besse Nuclear Power Plant suffered an event in September 1977 that manifested the same problem that triggered the melt down at Three Mile Island meltdown in March 1979. Eytchison states “the dynamite was that no manager or operator of the similar reactor at the Three Mile Island Plant had ever been informed about the Davis Besse accident.”
  
  The last and most recent major accident that Plokhy discusses occurred on March 11, 2011, when the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Plant was hit with a 9.1 Richter scale earthquake followed by a level three Tsunami which flowed over all retaining walls flooding the plant. As in all cases Plohky’s research is impeccable presenting the background of the Japanese nuclear industry, what went wrong, and what should have been learned from the accident. In 2002 safety violations at the plant were falsified and TEPCO who owned and operated the plant would not institute the overall seismic safety measures for the entire complex. The Japanese always build their nuclear facilities near water sources to save money in the cooling process. With Fukushima located in Okuma, Japan on the Pacific Ocean, it was a disaster that was waiting to happen.
  
  The Fukushima disasters present two aspects which Plokhy points out that are interesting. First, is the major difference between Japanese Prime Minister Naoto Kan who invested himself in the crisis to a degree unprecedented for any leader under similar circumstances. Eisenhower, MacMillan, Gorbachev, and to a lesser extent Carter all passed responsibility to others focusing more on withholding information and the domestic and international ramifications over what to do next. Second, is the comparison between Chernobyl and Fukushima. “Despite different levels of meltdown of reactor cores, no Chernobyl-type explosion of a reactor occurred at Fukushima-the result of the superior design of BWR reactors over RMBK type and the self-sacrifice of Japanese crews who worked overtime for days and weeks to supply water to the reactors.” Further, fewer people died and were irradiated causing deaths years later at the Japanese site than Chernobyl. Mortality at Fukushima rests around 10,000, while at Chernobyl the number reaches close to 50,000. The refugee issue is also different. Fukushima produced around 150,000 displacements, the Russian site 500,000. An ancillary result from these catastrophes has been the decline in support of the nuclear industry spurred on by anti-nuclear protests in Japan, the United States, and Germany in particular. However, the geo-political world, i.e., Russian invasion of Ukraine has called a halt somewhat in nuclear plant shutdowns because of the need for fossil fuels. In Germany and Japan, we have seen a reversal and nuclear plants that went offline since 1986 and 2011 are now going back online.
  
  In the end I agree with Jennifer Szalai who writes in her May 18, 2022, New York Times book review that ATOMS AND ASHES shows how the nuclear industry requires vast amounts of trust in the establishment — in scientific experts, government officials and corporate figures, a number of whom didn’t exactly acquit themselves well in the dismal examples recounted here. Part of this has to do with the real limits of knowledge; for all the confident pronouncements and safety guarantees, the awesome power of nuclear energy doesn’t always behave in ways that are predicted. Not to mention that the effects of radiation exposure can vary wildly.” “The existing nuclear industry is an open-ended liability, Plokhy writes. With catastrophic climate change bearing down on us, nuclear power has been promoted by some as an obvious solution, but this sobering history urges us to look hard at that bargain for what it is.”
  
• 
  Ben

  A challenging story on the accident risks of nuclear power. The chapter on Chernobyl was perhaps the weakest, as I have read better accounts, but the other chapters were strong, especially the brief Fukushima summary.
  
  > the main source of contamination was the radiation control point itself. Radioactive particles washed off dirty vehicles stayed on the spot, and, as people walked from dirty buses to clean ones, they picked up radioactive dust and carried it into the buses and their apartments.
  
  > Britain’s first atomic establishment became known as the brainiest town in the country. If one counts people with degrees, it turned into one of Britain’s most educated places. And they had smart children, too—the grades in local schools were higher than anywhere else. One former pupil recalled that they could not get a physics teacher in their school because the quality of the homework was so high that regular teachers of physics were afraid to take the job
  
  > Frustrated, Yoshida, who knew that a delay in pumping seawater into the reactor might cause a second, much more damaging explosion, decided to ignore both the prime minister and TEPCO. “I continued with the pumping of seawater based on the judgment that the most important thing was to … prevent the spread of the accident,” recalled Yoshida later. He called in one of his managers and told him: “I am going to direct you to stop the seawater injection, but do not stop it.” He then gave a loud order in front of the cameras of the telecommunication system linking him with TEPCO headquarters to stop the pumping. Despite that formal order, the pumping continued.
  
  > “When I heard about the evacuation request, I was feeling that I had to stake my political life on resolving the situation,” recalled [Prime Minister Naoto] Kan later. “That made me feel the request was totally out of line.” Kan’s aides shared his sentiment. “We must ask TEPCO to hold the fort, even if they have to put together a suicide squad,” said one of them. TEPCO officials denied that they had ever suggested complete evacuation of the site. Instead, they had allegedly considered the evacuation only of nonessential personnel. The videoconference footage that TEPCO was later forced to release suggested otherwise, supporting Kan’s understanding that the company was prepared to abandon the station altogether.
• 
  Brad

  Well, I didn't really think much of this book, it reads more like a term paper than any kind of compelling narrative. I don't think it's particularly well written. The (mostly) well-known examples of these disasters all pretty much follow a similar path:
  1. Pressure from governments or business competitiveness lead to shortcuts in design, safety features, training etc;
  2. A problem occurs that either should have been anticipated or was anticipated but due to poor training, design, shoddy materials, or human error, is not appropriately dealt with;
  3. Businesses and (especially) governments are desperate to conceal the causes and (especially) severity of the crises;
  Stir, mix, and repeat.
  I think this might have been a better book had the author not treated each accident in its own chapter and instead done a more macro look at the problems with nuclear power and delved into the particulars of each incident together, comparing, for example, design flaws or construction short cuts together.
  I also think the fact that many of these disasters have had their own books (in the cases of Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, and Fukushima, many different books) written leaves one with the feeling that "Atoms and Ashes" is almost a Cliff's Notes version, and it leaves the reader unmoved. It is mostly too dry. For example, not that long ago I read "Midnight in Chernobyl" which was an unbelievable work or research and an edge-of-your-seat thriller as well as an absolutely gripping polemic. THAT book was terrifying. This book, despite the author's best intentions, was yawn-inducing.
• 
  A. Shaskan

  A dry and monotonous retelling of famous nuclear accidents. The book would have been better with fewer details and more analysis. Also, I gather that the author is marshaling these cases as evidence in his argument against nuclear power, but is it fair to focus on the few times nuclear power went wrong? How many oil tankers have ever spilled? Not to mention …climate change? Nuclear power is still one of the best out of the bad options available.
• 
  Jeremy

  Plokhy's approach to history is one that is focused on understanding the mistakes that were made and this is a topic to which that approach couldn't be more perfect. There were many places where I felt that the details of physics and engineering could have been just a bit clearer, but as a record of the institutional and human factors that played out in these disasters this was superb
• 
  Neil Fox

  Serhii Plokhny’s definitive account of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster, Chernobyl- history of a nuclear catastrophe - left the reader questioning just how uniquely Soviet the response to the accident was. Now we have an in-dept answer as he examines 5 other accidents plus Chernobyl itself in terms of their historical context, causes and aftermaths. This is the story of 6 accidents divided into 3 ‘atoms for war’ stories - those of Bikini Atoll, Kyshtym and Windscale in the 50’s, and 3 ‘atoms for peace’ stories of 3 mile island, Chernobyl & Fukushima. What all have in common is the ‘Soviet’ predisposition for secrecy, denial, cover up, lack of transparency and finally the blame game when things go wrong in the nuclear realm, regardless if the setting is the US, the UK, Japan or the Soviet Union. The other things all 6 incidents have in common is the confused, panicky & erratic decision making on the ground, the tendency to look to blame individuals rather than design , management or political culture or processes; a deficient safety & training culture and above all the placement of production quotas, drive for results and thirst for energy above safety.
  
  At a time when we are yet again confronted by an energy crisis combined with the urgent challenges to address climate change, it is tempting to once again turn to nuclear power. Plokhny’s work serves a timely reminder from history that when things go wrong with this technology, it has the potential to make vast swathes of our planet permanently uninhabitable for human life for thousands of years. This is to say nothing of the vast destructive potential of the atom when used for making war, a step we have also moved closer to on the doomsday clock.Dry and technical that Plokhny’s subject may be, this contains essential warnings to be heeded regarding man’s potential for his genius to turn to his destruction. Just as Prometheus gave the gift of fire to humanity, so the Gods punished and cursed him for his transgressions.
• 
  Laurel

  (2.5 rounded up because I still found this useful even if I have some bones to pick)
  
  The parts I quite liked are the range of events covered, the historical context provided on each event, the sources, and the near chronological listing of happenings in each disaster. This book is a good informational source even if it isn't one I would consider a primary or definitive source. (I do love his sources though. Granted I'm a sucker for any kind of decent bibliography but still...) I did learn quite a bit as well on things such as the nuclear race starting with Germany, which makes sense in retrospect but my brain always connected it with Russia, and especially about the Kyshtym incident which I had never heard of before.
  
  Now the things I wasn't as big of a fan of...
  
  The MATH and NUMBERS in here are not my specialty, but even I know when introducing a topic your audience may not be familiar with to make sure the units match. Now, the numbers he provides may be direct from the sources Plokhy is citing, but still - it makes grasping the scale of the individual disasters quite tricky when I can't get a decent grasp of the numbers. Prepare to do lots of unit conversions to try and grasp scale to compare these incidents. It was hard to truly identify the difference in impact between disasters from the numbers alone as they were not consistent. (Many thanks to those who know numbers better than me and confirmed that this was actually an issue and not just me being unable to comprehend the numbers.) The structured, patterned language makes for a bit of a dull read at times even when the information is interesting too.
  
  Overall - informational and relevant to those interested in the topic but nowhere near comprehensive, and I would do further research to get context on some of his blanket statements (for example, Shippingport has been decommissioned as have several other commercial plants).
• 
  Jim Rimmer

  Many countries are challenged by the need to accommodate every increasing energy needs while also de-carbonising. In most instances this will mean there are more than a few advocates for nuclear energy. In Australia this has been personified by 16 year old William Shackel, born more than 10 years after Chernobyl and probably still eating Clag™ when Fukushima happened. Which brings to mind the variously attributed quote, "Those who do not learn history are doomed to repeat it."
  
  Plokhy covers that history in considerable detail while not loosing sight of the humanity of all the various people directly and indirectly involved in the six case studies he explores. In each and every instance there have been shortcuts taken, subsequent cover-ups, and enormous financial, environmental and health sacrifices faced by future generations.
  
  Little is likely to change any time soon.
  
  Atoms and Ashes makes evident yet again that if nuclear energy is the answer then you're asking the wrong question.
  
  Though perhaps beyond scope this is just another tome that doesn't capture the damage caused by British nuclear testing at Emu Plains and Maralinga, nor French testing at Mururoa and Fangataufa atolls. The people impacted by these "experiments" have been silent witnesses to a poisonous legacy.
• 
  Raunak

  A good compendium of al the major nuclear disasters of the world so far. The reporting of the Kyshtym/Mayak and Windscale disasters were particularly well done, and gave me plenty of new information. The rest were ... less so, seemed to be more akin to wikipedia-ish overviews. Also requires another editing pass, lots of information (and sometimes sentence fragments) kept being repeated.
• 
  Sean Guynes

  Absolutely excellent overview history of 6 major nuclear disasters that tours the issues in technology, governance, and society in creating and responding to these disasters, and usefully shows the difference in Western, Soviet, and Japanese nuclear industries.
• 
  Elyse

  Extremely dry. I made it through the first two disasters then DNF. Midnight In Chernobyl and Command and Control are much better told.
• 
  Julia

  While I disagree with Plokhy’s conclusions, this was an interesting account of various nuclear disasters.
• 
  Leah

  Dr. Plokhy covers a lot of the basics of some of the world's most devastating nuclear disasters in this book, including not only the technical aspects of what happened, but the political environment in which they occurred. A lot of it is fascinating reading and I got a lot out of it. I did struggle with the conclusion and recommendation that because these accidents happen, nuclear power (or at least nuclear fission) should be abandoned for commercial energy production. Yes, these accidents were all incredibly devastating. They were also all incredibly preventable, and yet this book leaves the reader with the impression that catastrophic accidents of this type are inevitable in the nuclear energy field, and that simply is not the case. For a book that spent so much time highlighting the political and economic environments in which these accidents took place, the conclusion that the technology itself is inherently unsafe felt wildly unsupported. Color me unimpressed.
  
  I did find the summaries of these disasters and the manual errors that were made very insightful, and I think that this book would have been best served by focusing on the political and economic contexts of these accidents - this is where this book really shown. As with disasters of any kind, there are human decisions made that can highlight anything from a lack of staff training to overzealous political involvement to dangerous cost cutting and under-regulation in both public and private sectors, etc. We can learn from examples where, for instance, the US hired a bunch of Navy veterans who had experience predominantly with nuclear submarines to work in their plants, and the priorities and strategies for controlling a core melt accident on a sub are very different than those for a nuclear power plant - that is a training deficiency that was clearly seen at Three Mile Island. Pressure to outperform other countries or to improve YoY at an incredibly unsustainable rate undeniably contributed majorly to both Castle Bravo and Chernobyl, leading to moving forward or continuing operations that were known to be unsafe. Then there is national pride, elitism, and judgmental attitudes toward other countries (like the USSR) that were seen from the US to Europe to Japan that impacted their ability to learn as well as they could from disasters like Kyshtym and Chernobyl. It's all very fascinating and leaves the reader with a lot to consider.
  
  I wish this book talked more about the flaws and failures of the infrastructure design that contributed to these disasters (would have made the conclusion much stronger) or even the regulatory failures (which were abundant in all of these cases). I also appreciated the technical detail, but found it often reported in unnecessarily confusing ways (e.g., arbitrarily referring to power output in both MW and MWe without ever even explaining the difference between MWe and MWt - not that it was terribly relevant - or radiation exposure randomly in mSv or rem) and occasionally even misleading ways. For example, this statement really bothered me: "With 443 reactors running in the world at the time of the study, the chances of an accident occurring in the next twenty five years is assessed with 95 percent confidence at between 0.82 and 7.7. That means we are likely to see another accident before 2036." There are so many issues here it is hard to know where to begin. First and foremost, the citation he gives for these numbers does not touch on them at all, so it's not possible to really verify what exactly this statement means. (Although I'm quite confident he is pulling from this book chapter, which he never actually cites:
  https://libkey.io/10.5772/intechopen....). What the study authors actually say (verbatim) is that "In a world with 443 reactors, with 95% confidence we have to expect between 0.82 and 7.7 core melt accidents within the next 25 years." A very different statement than the one Plokhy made. AND the numbers that he quotes here are before adjusting for learning effects, which is the entire point of their paper. Not to mention that Plokhy also cites this as one accident in 37,000 reactor years, but the study authors actually conclude it is 1 in 3,700 - an entire order of magnitude difference. The math in this book is all around shoddy and a bit lazy honestly, but this is the example that threw me over the edge and I lost all faith in the technical aspects of this book. Luckily, that was not really the focus of it. But honestly, do publishers not bother with technical editing anymore? Because there were A LOT of math errors and misleading interpretations of data here, along with citations missed as often as they were included. Very disappointing. I would take technical data reported here with a heaping spoon of salt, but again, that wasn't really the focus of the book, so I'll cut it a little slack.
• 
  Saju Pillai

  Diagrams! For the love of God, man, put in some diagrams the next time you try to describe a nuclear reactor going supercritical
• 
  Josh

  A well-researched discussion of the six biggest nuclear disasters, at least to date. Given some of what went down, it's a wonder or perhaps a miracle that we haven't had more.
  
  Given the storage problem for renewable energy, unless things change nuclear energy is part of our future. I read this book as a cautionary tale, in part, but also as presenting examples of how things can go wrong with nuclear reactors so that thought leaders can avoid or minimize mistakes made in operation or design, or both.
  
  
• 
  Milo

  Interesting summaries of the separate incidents, but it read more as six disjointed stories than one cohesive narrative. Hence, the argument felt weak - yes, nuclear accidents are possible, but so are accidents with other energy sources (Deepwater Horizon? Exxon Valdez?), and previous accidents certainly do not make us "likely to see another before 2036". I felt Command and Control was a far better written approach to nuclear accidents, even if of a slightly different variety.
• 
  Henri

  A fantastic and incredibly timely offering from one of our greatest Chernobyl experts about the costs involved in managing a nuclear disaster.
  
  Serhii Plokhy is known for his bestsellers on Chernobyl and histories of Ukraine and Russia. This time he turns he expert eye to six of the worst nuclear catastrophes to befall humanity in the age of the atom. As always, the writing is lucid yet authoritative and no detail is missed. After reading this you will feel like you've learned something about the technological development of the nuclear industry without actually having to study it in depth. Simulatenously, the author brings to light the colourful personalities that made the key decisions in all six cases, showing that ultimately it's human error and human perseverance are two things that balance us between nuclear armageddon and untapped renewable energy potential.
  
  This book has released in the same time as the Netflix documentary on the Three Mile Island accident, and if you've enjoyed that you should read this, it will not only top up your knowledge from the series but also tell you five other tales of humanity risking it all in the game against nature.
  
  I had a great pleasure to speak to the author about the book in depth and his enthusiasm for sharing the history of this particular moment is palpable. In Putin's aggression against Ukraine of last month, it was incredibly to see Russian soldiers dig trenches in the Red Forest just outside the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone. Does humanity not learn, and are the textbooks of modern Russia that suppressive of the disastrous Soviet attempts to deal with Chernobyl that people not know the basics? We can just speculate.
  
  Otherwise enjoy this book. The book only dedicates 40-50 pages to each disaster so if you'd rather read more in depth about any of them there are books for it. Author's 'Chernobyl' is a winner of the Ballie Gifford and a fantastic book I'd recommend to anyone.
• 
  N.S. Ford

  This review first appeared on my blog -
  https://nsfordwriter.com - on 13th May 2022.
  
  An informative and rather frightening history of nuclear accidents which focuses on Bikini Atoll, Kyshtym, Windscale, Three Mile Island, Chernobyl and Fukushima. The writing is straightforward and not too technical, although it doesn't have the gripping narrative style of, for example, Adam Higginbotham's book Midnight in Chernobyl (which is one of the sources).
  
  After some context of how the nuclear industry began, starting with 'atoms for war' and moving on to 'atoms for peace', the author examines how and why these notorious disasters happened, the role of the media and the effects on the population. He also compares the responses of the different governments. Politics, one way or another, is always a main cause of the accidents. I don't have a background in either science or politics but I found the explanations easy to understand and feel that I've learnt a lot from this book. The message I took from it is that the potential for costly and damaging accidents is not a risk that humanity should be taking and even though the industry can learn from past mistakes, the future is not nuclear.
  
  The several different measurements of radioactivity used in this book were very confusing - roentgens, rem, curies, becquerel, rads, sieverts, grays. Although there was an explanation of these at the beginning, it didn't really help, as there were a variety of them used in each chapter. For me, they became meaningless numbers without much context.
  
  The book was written before the 2022 conflict in Ukraine brought the fear of nuclear disasters back into the media spotlight, while the resulting fuel crisis, coupled with climate change, is accelerating the debate on nuclear power. It's therefore a particularly timely read.
• 
  Tim Pendry

  
  Serhii Plokhy, a Ukrainian historian who has already written on Chernobyl, takes us through six nuclear disasters, the decisions that led to each disaster and its consequences in a useful contribution to the nuclear debate. He does not take a stand, he merely gives us the data to enable us to do so.
  
  The first three arise from the primarily military interest in nuclear power (Bikini Atoll [US], Kishtym [Soviet] and Windscale [UK]) and the second three from the 'atoms for peace' era (Three Mile Island [US], Chernobyl [Soviet] and Fukushima [Japan]).
  
  In all cases, there is no malice here. These are warriors, scientists, engineers and business people 'learning through doing' and getting it horribly wrong (quite rarely in fact) from ignorance, inexperience and/or basic human error often derived from local organisational realities.
  
  The problem with 'learning through doing' is that the consequences of mistakes are far more potentially serious with nuclear power than getting the building of a bridge wrong or a railway signaling system or even the electronics in an aircraft.
  
  The common denominator in all these accidents is simple human error compounding technological flaws in design and/or events that could have been predicted but were not because someone simply did not think of them (most notably the possibility of a major tsunami overtopping a sea wall).
  
  The question that springs to mind - since each accident improves procedures and technology and a consequent withdrawal from peaceful nuclear power allows time to learn for the next building cycle - is whether the next wave of enthusiasm for nuclear power will result in another major accident or not.
  
  The book does not give us a great deal of confidence in this respect. At the moment, thanks to the twin panics over energy security and climate change, both Green and national security apparats are going hell for leather for a massive revival of the use of nuclear power.
  
  This will ostensibly be based on an increase in new and 'improved' nuclear power stations but also on smaller, local SMRs (small modular reactors) assuming the proponents of these latter can get past the resistance of local communities - which is why safety is going to be a political issue.
  
  It is probably true that the next wave of nuclear reactors will be much safer than anything that has appeared before. It is equally true that nuclear accidents are uncommon - after all, there have (to date) been no further major accidents even with old Soviet stock in Ukraine since Fukushima.
  
  So, putting aside equally problematic issues related to waste disposal and the vast cost of decommissioning nuclear power stations (another major 'tax' dumped on a non-voting future), why should we retain a degree of concern?
  
  The statistics say that a multiplication of reactors is more likely than not to result in another major case of human error merging with technological weaknesses and strategic errors to provide us with the high probability of another tragic nuclear event some time in the next thirty years somewhere.
  
  And this likelihood is the more likely because the scale of production of SMRs and their spread creates serious issues with the availability of fully trained and (initially) experienced nuclear engineers. Junior staff with insufficient traning are a definite factor in some of these accidents.
  
  The UK Government has already recognised a shortage of nuclear engineers and proposes to do something about it but we are living in a global market place with nuclear power assets soon to be developed on a global scale - that is the accident waiting to happen: skilled labour shortages.
  
  But does it matter? Given the energy security and environmental arguments, surely a few thousand kids dying in one locality of thyroid cancer and so forth is a 'price worth paying' to the utilitarian types operating at the highest level of decision-making - not that any dare say so openly.
  
  What struck me was that, unlike the use of nuclear weaponry, the consequences of a nuclear accident were a lot less than I had expected. It seems that chance exposure and genetic resilience mean that some people are immune to radio-active effects and other devastated by it. It is a lottery.
  
  Nevertheless for those affected, the consequences can be truly devastating and long-lasting. The fear must be that nuclear power expansion, with the eventual inevitability of some accident or other, is going to result in 'hot spots' of misery and individual tragedy that need to be faced.
  
  The public policy debate is, as usual, one of misdirection, smoke and mirrors because the nuclear lobby dare not face us with the gaming aspect of the decision-making - a few of us will die or get sick so that the vast majority will have the energy they need to live. Who dies will be a chance event.
  
  The lobby is also wholly evasive about the problem of accumulating radioactive cost which will not be able to be dumped on the 'third world' in time-honoured waste dumping tradition and about the costs to future generations of replacement and decommissioning of assets.
  
  In a world where the US has just got a minor debt downgrade because of the scale of its debt, no one is calculating the fact that the private-public balance is actually thoroughly skewed. The taxpayer is going to pay through the nose for subsidising building, decommissioning and accident clean-up.
  
  On the other hand, there is the utilitarian argument that 'something must be done' to ensure energy security (despite energy insecurity being the result of suicidal foreign policy decision-making) and stop climate change (despite the burden on future generations of the solution).
  
  Personally I cannot come down on one side or the other of the debate but only want an honest debate that includes future generations and that cuts out the exclusive voices of those with an interest in taxing us or profiting from us.
  
  Plokhy's book will not answer the question 'what is to be done?' but it is well worth reading for a well researched blow-by-blow account of what actually happens in a nuclear accident and what the consequences are in each of his six cases.
  
  At the end of the day, nuclear power expansion is a gamble in which a disinterested position is hard to find and where it is hard to have confidence in those making the decisions. What we need are the facts in the case. Plokhy does us a great service in that respect.
  
  
• 
  Matthew Linton

  "Atoms and Ashes" provides a good overview of the most famous nuclear disasters in world history. Plokhy successfully balances narrative and argument throughout. While each of the six cases can stand on their own, "Atoms and Ashes" highlights common issues - secrecy around nuclear technology, dysfunction relationships between scientists and politicians, and a disregard for communities around nuclear sites, among others - that factored into many of the cases. Though there isn't a lot of new historical evidence here, it is compelling to have all these cases laid out together. The global historical approach to nuclear disasters, in Plokhy's capable hands, highlights transnational debates about the promise of nuclear energy and the challenges of separating "atoms for peace" from atomic weapons in the public consciousness.
  
  Oddly, the biggest shortcoming of the book is the way Plokhy moots much of his argument in the introduction by noting that it is cost, not safety, that is the biggest barrier to widespread nuclear energy use. While this recasts some of the disasters as an unnecessary waste of human life, it also begs the question why a global history of nuclear disasters is necessary when a history of the political economy of nuclear energy may be more relevant to its future.
  
  I found this book to be a useful one stop shop to learn about nuclear disasters in the 20th century. Plokhy's writing and argument are clear, though perhaps not written in a particularly dynamic way. A useful addition to the Cold War historiography and a good starting point for exploration into the history of nuclear energy.
• 
  Richard Rodriguez

  An episode on Bill Nye’s, Planetary Radio, interviewing the author Serhii Plokhy gave great insight into what Plokhy’s latest nonfiction book is about. A great interview and an even greater read, “Atoms and Ashes” is an incredibly detailed depiction of the history behind the Cold War, and the rapid rise of nuclear technology post WWII, the dangers surrounding nuclear reactors, and the numerous disasters that in many cases were covered up to some extent or another by competing governments. From the Chernobyl nuclear reactor disaster in Ukraine 1986 to the preceding Three Mile Island disaster in the United States 1979, governments have long argued in defense of developing and exploiting nuclear technology, from its uses in war to the Atoms for Peace program introduced by President Eisenhower in 1953. Plokhy airs out every nation’s dirty laundry, disclosing top secret interviews between experts in the field and their government officials eager to one up their neighbors. This book is a definitive in the history of global nuclear disasters. It excels in its explanation of the science behind the historical development of nuclear technology, the differences between atomic and nuclear weapons development, their fallout, and working its way to more complicated explanations on the development and maintenance of nuclear reactors. I highly recommend this book to anyone interested in the history of the Cold War.
• 
  Chesli

  A quick overview of six different nuclear disasters which spanned the globe during the long race toward nuclear power. While Plokhy does touch on the infamous Chernobyl and the most recent disaster in Fukushima, he also covers different events that I don't hear brought up as often (e.g, Kyshtym and Windscale). Looking over the history, it's interesting to see how different actions taken stemmed from those taken by a country previously as well as from the close scrutiny of competing countries regardless of whether they were allies or outright adversaries. Everything was always interconnected in one way or another even if it was supposedly carried out in secret. Honestly, the secrets and withheld information are what frustrate me whenever I read anything surrounding the development of nuclear power. Some accidents could have been prevented and technology could have been further along if only political and economic tensions didn't stand in the way. (Yes, I know I'm hoping for too much, especially with events already carried out, but it's still so infuriating.) Despite the frustrations and all the events which would lead anyone to be skeptical of continuing down this path, I'm glad that Plokhy included an afterward which discussed briefly the future of nuclear energy and how people are slowly moving forward with the science (hopefully in a more cautious manner).
  
  (Note: I would have finished this book sooner but a couple of personal life events got in the way.)