Many of the new, smaller reactors that have been designed from scratch to produce energy, are still at the computer-simulation stage and years away from construction. Plokhy predicts that the expansion in the number of plants now being proposed will increase the probability of accidents.

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.” Quite a book good written in an interesting manner. I have a couple of minor issues, though. In the foreword, the author explains how over time different standards of measuring radioactivity have changed, which makes it difficult to make direct comparisons. Different standards are also used based on the purpose of the measurement. Do you want to measure general radiation, do you want to measure the impact on the human body? And he pretty much leaves it at that and uses whatever was in use at the time of the various accidents. I think, the layman would be better served if one standard was used and everything converted to that. With modern computers, it has to be quite an easy thing.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]). 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. 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. In his new book Atoms and Ashes: A Global History of Nuclear Disasters, Serhii Plokhy, Harvard University professor of Ukrainian History, explores the dangers of nuclear power through six of the worst nuclear disasters: the 1954 Castle Bravo hydrogen bomb test, the 1957 Kyshtym nuclear waste tank explosion, the 1957 English Windscale reactor fire, the 1979 Three Mile Island partial reactor meltdown, the 1986 Chernobyl reactor meltdown, and the 2011 Fukushima disaster. The most illuminating revelations of Atoms and Ashes by Serhii Plokhy are the three older and more obscure incidents: Castle Bravo in 1954, the Kyshtym disaster and the Windscale fire in 1957.

From the start, Russia chose to use outdated and unsafe reactor designs. Safer ones would have taken longer to build and they had no time to spare when racing against the US. The operators and nuclear engineers at Chernobyl had not even been told about the previous accidents with this type of reactor. Similarly, no manager or operator at Three Mile Island had been told of problems with the type of reactor they were using. It had previously caused an accident at another plant. Plokhy describes almost minute by minute the trajectory of each disaster. In all of them, there comes a point when the scientists, the operators, the experts simply don’t know what to do to prevent the accident from worsening. In the end, due to the conditions they are operating under, they sometimes make decisions that actually make the situation worse. Or, by solving one problem, another one is created. At Windscale, they simply did not know how to stop the fire. At Chernobyl one issue among many was that they did not know if the radiation would get into the groundwater. And at Three Mile Island, two scientists were having a raging argument about what next steps to take in the midst of the emergency. Meanwhile, in every case, the authorities delayed evacuation plans.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. 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.

Plokhy expertly creates a picture of the international nuclear industry. “The story told here is a global one,” he writes, examining “not only the actions and omissions of those directly involved but also the ideologies, politics, and cultures that contributed to the disasters.” For example, the Castle Bravo accident sets the stage for later chapters by introducing the pressures of the Cold War, government efforts to cover up disasters, and the inevitability of human error when dealing with emerging science and technology. This is a powerful and timely book. At a time when arguments for nuclear power are returning as a way to solve both climate change and the energy crisis, we need to arm ourselves with the arguments. Not only is nuclear power not a solution to the problems we face, the lesson from this book is that it’s inherently dangerous and could have devastating consequences for life on earth. Both of the 1957 disasters were also related to nuclear weapons, specifically the production of weapons-grade material. The Kyshtym episode in the Soviet Union resulted from the explosion of a poorly maintained underground nuclear waste tank and the Windscale incident involved a British reactor intended to produce fuel for nuclear weapons. Atoms and Ashes: A Global History of Nuclear Disasters During other disasters workers were expected to take huge risks to solve the crisis. This included looking into the reactor core to assess what was happening during the Windscale fire, firefighters at Chernobyl operating without the proper safety equipment, and workers clearing contaminated ground and soil at Kyshtym. After the Fukushima meltdown authorities described those sent into the reactor building as the “suicide squad”. Citing not only the potential for disaster but its great economic costs, Plokhy discounts the hopes of some experts who champion nuclear power as a partial alternative to fossil fuels and global warming, downplaying the prospects of improved reactor and plant designs. “Many of the political, economic, social, and cultural factors that led to the accidents of the past are still with us today, making the nuclear industry vulnerable to repeating old mistakes in new and unexpected ways,” he writes. A new accident would threaten any further development of the industry “for at least another 20 years,” Plokhy adds. “This makes the nuclear industry not only risky to operate but impossible to count on as a long-term solution to an overwhelming problem” — climate change.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.