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Way back when I was in college, someone gave me a book that they thought I should read. "You've been working with plutonium, and you have an interest in nuclear weapons. You really ought to read this book." The book was The Making of the Atomic Bomb, by Richard Rhodes. He was awarded the 1988 Pulitzer Prize in general nonfiction for that book, and it is well deserved. It's my belief that anyone who wants to truly understand the American legacy of the first two nuclear bombs, and the consequences of their use, should read that book, as well as Rhodes two subsequent books on nuclear weapons: Dark Sun: The Making of the Hydrogen Bomb, and Arsenals of Folly: The Making of the Nuclear Arms Race. Since I've been writing quite a bit about current-day nuclear weapons issues, I thought it would be good to step back and take a look at the big picture again. What better way to do that than to talk to Richard Rhodes, nuclear weapons historian and journalist extraordinaire?

Way back when I was in college, someone gave me a book that they thought I should read. "You've been working with plutonium, and you have an interest in nuclear weapons. You really ought to read this book." The book was The Making of the Atomic Bomb, by Richard Rhodes. He was awarded the 1988 Pulitzer Prize in general nonfiction for that book, and it is well deserved. It's my belief that anyone who wants to truly understand the American legacy of the first two nuclear bombs, and the consequences of their use, should read that book, as well as Rhodes two subsequent books on nuclear weapons: Dark Sun: The Making of the Hydrogen Bomb, and Arsenals of Folly: The Making of the Nuclear Arms Race. Since I've been writing quite a bit about current-day nuclear weapons issues, I thought it would be good to step back and take a look at the big picture again. What better way to do that than to talk to Richard Rhodes, nuclear weapons historian and journalist extraordinaire?

A Japanese artist and a Hiroshima citizens group plan to publish a picture book in late July to explain in an easy-to-understand manner a protocol proposed by an international group of mayors calling for nuclear elimination, local media reported. Seitaro Kuroda, a 70-year-old artist, said he proposed publishing such a book that can be read easily by children after perusing the protocol and thinking that it contained good elements but was "rigid with too many Chinese characters," Kyodo News reported. The book will include anti-nuclear peace messages from students in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the two Japanese cities on which the U.S. military dropped atomic bombs during World War II. The citizens group will self-publish the 64-page book, printing about 5,000 copies to be sold for 500 yen each.

I am writing to announce that a new book, which my father authored, has just been published on the subject of depleted uranium. It's title is "A Primer in the Art of Deception: The Cult of Nuclearists, Uranium Weapons and Fraudulent Science". It is a science book, written for the layperson, detailing how science has been falsified to serve the political interests of covering up the health effects of internal contamination by radionuclides from nuclear weapon testing, commercial nuclear power plants and DU weapons. I forward to you a review of the work as it has been igniting a significant interest in the news world and I feel you may have interest to report on it as well. It is a rude awakening, and I ask you personally if you will help spread awareness of this shocking volume.

If we are serious about curbing climate change, what would actually help? More people in cities, lots of nuclear power stations and lashings of GM crops, urges Stewart Brand. Unless green activists embrace the benefits of all three, they are not part of the solution, but part of the problem. This prescription, from the founder of that quintessential 1960s publication the Whole Earth Catalog, comes as a surprise. And his eclectically informative new book makes the most of it. I care about the Earth, and especially about the fate of humanity, says Brand. I have changed my mind about how to exercise that care, and so should you.

If we are serious about curbing climate change, what would actually help? More people in cities, lots of nuclear power stations and lashings of GM crops, urges Stewart Brand. Unless green activists embrace the benefits of all three, they are not part of the solution, but part of the problem. This prescription, from the founder of that quintessential 1960s publication the Whole Earth Catalog, comes as a surprise. And his eclectically informative new book makes the most of it. I care about the Earth, and especially about the fate of humanity, says Brand. I have changed my mind about how to exercise that care, and so should you.

Please be informed. An outstanding book is out by novelist Gwyneth Cravens titled Power to Save the World. In this book the author traces her journey from Nuclear opponent to an understanding that it represents truly the path toward saving the world. Ms Cravens met a scientist Dr Rip Anderson who is an expert in risk assessment and analysis and nuclear energy. He patiently explained the true benefits of nuclear power apparently overcoming every objection posed by the conventional wisdom of nuclear opponents. The two of them decided that the book would detail the authors journey conducted by Dr Anderson toward nuclear understanding.

The Three Mile Island accident of 1979 changed the future of the nuclear industry, making the public more aware of the dangers of having a nuclear plant next door. The accident shattered a naïve sense of trust, and forced government officials and the industry to look more closely at security and safety issues. Robert Del Tredici, a Canadian photographer, artist and teacher, documented that pivotal time 30 years ago. His first book documented the people living around the Three Mile Island nuclear facility. Published in 1980, the book was part sociology and part critique of nuclear power. Since then, Del Tredici has gone on to publish other books on the nuclear industry, as well as teaching and working with government officials.

Deceptions about our nuclear weapons have "threatened the survival of the human species." Two Years After Nisour Square Massacre, Blackwater Still Armed and Dangerous In Iraq Jeremy Scahill Holbrooke on Afghanistan: It's Not Whether You Win or Lose, It's How You Play the Game Danielle Kurtzleben The Tragedy of Our 'Disappeared' Veterans Penny Coleman Why Are U.S. Officials Protecting the Pakistan Military on Aid to Taliban? Gareth Porter Honduras: "People Are In The Streets Every Day" Jessica Pupovac A Statement On My Friends, Three U.S. Hikers Reportedly Detained at Iran/Iraq Border Shon Meckfessel More stories by Daniel Ellsberg RSS icon World RSS Feed RSS icon Main AlterNet RSS Feed Advertisement Upcoming AlterNet stories on Digg Digg What is Digg? * 62 diggs Burning Questions for the Authors of 'Marijuana Is Safer' The authors of a new book on misconceptions about marijuana respond to the torrent of comments on an excerpt published on AlterNet. On August 6, AlterNet posted an excerpt from the new book Marijuana Is Safer: So Why Are We Driving Americans to Drink? (Chelsea Green, 2009). Reader response was overwhelming. Within hours, the excerpt was.... * 58 diggs 10 Awesome Things Would Happen If Health Reform Passes Forget the fearmongering scare tactics of the right, here's how your life will actually be better. The truth about health care reform. * 45 diggs Lou Dobbs Tours Single-Payer Systems Abroad and Realizes... Has CNN's government-out-of-my-face bloviator actually had a change of heart when it comes to Obama's health plan? * 34 diggs Right-Wing Militias Haven't Always Been Racist- they are now There are growing signs that militias are on the rise again and now their target isn't just government, but Blacks and Latinos. * 29 diggs 7 Ways We Can Fight Back Against the Rising Fascist Threat | Why the right-wing extremism must be stopped in its tracks or else

Deceptions about our nuclear weapons have "threatened the survival of the human species." Two Years After Nisour Square Massacre, Blackwater Still Armed and Dangerous In Iraq Jeremy Scahill Holbrooke on Afghanistan: It's Not Whether You Win or Lose, It's How You Play the Game Danielle Kurtzleben The Tragedy of Our 'Disappeared' Veterans Penny Coleman Why Are U.S. Officials Protecting the Pakistan Military on Aid to Taliban? Gareth Porter Honduras: "People Are In The Streets Every Day" Jessica Pupovac A Statement On My Friends, Three U.S. Hikers Reportedly Detained at Iran/Iraq Border Shon Meckfessel More stories by Daniel Ellsberg RSS icon World RSS Feed RSS icon Main AlterNet RSS Feed Advertisement Upcoming AlterNet stories on Digg Digg What is Digg? * 62 diggs Burning Questions for the Authors of 'Marijuana Is Safer' The authors of a new book on misconceptions about marijuana respond to the torrent of comments on an excerpt published on AlterNet. On August 6, AlterNet posted an excerpt from the new book Marijuana Is Safer: So Why Are We Driving Americans to Drink? (Chelsea Green, 2009). Reader response was overwhelming. Within hours, the excerpt was.... * 58 diggs 10 Awesome Things Would Happen If Health Reform Passes Forget the fearmongering scare tactics of the right, here's how your life will actually be better. The truth about health care reform. * 45 diggs Lou Dobbs Tours Single-Payer Systems Abroad and Realizes... Has CNN's government-out-of-my-face bloviator actually had a change of heart when it comes to Obama's health plan? * 34 diggs Right-Wing Militias Haven't Always Been Racist- they are now There are growing signs that militias are on the rise again and now their target isn't just government, but Blacks and Latinos. * 29 diggs 7 Ways We Can Fight Back Against the Rising Fascist Threat | Why the right-wing extremism must be stopped in its tracks or else

"The mountain that John D'Agata is ostensibly concerned with in his slim but powerful new book, "About a Mountain," is Yucca Mountain, located approximately 100 miles north of Las Vegas. And he's not the only one interested in it: since the mid-1980s, the United States government has been doing back flips to bury the country's entire reservoir of spent nuclear waste - some 77,000 tons of apocalyptic yumminess - deep inside Yucca. In the summer of 2002, the summer after D'Agata helped his mother move to a Vegas suburb, Congress was proceeding with plans to make the mountain a nuclear dump. Also that summer, 16-year-old Levi Presley jumped to his death from the observation deck of a third-rate Vegas hotel. These subjects, disparate though they are, animate D'Agata's sprawling narrative."

A Washington State University Press book by former Hanford regulator Max S. Power has been chosen one of the "Best of the Best from the University Presses" by the American Library Association. America's Nuclear Wastelands: Politics, Accountability, and Cleanup, looks at the legacy of waste left at Hanford and other nuclear sites from decades of nuclear weapons production. The book also covers the current institutional and political environment as it affects waste cleanup and the critical role of public involvement in making decisions about cleanup.

"Nearly one million people around the world died from exposure to radiation released by the 1986 nuclear disaster at the Chernobyl reactor, finds a new book from the New York Academy of Sciences published today on the 24th anniversary of the meltdown at the Soviet facility. The book, "Chernobyl: Consequences of the Catastrophe for People and the Environment," was compiled by authors Alexey Yablokov of the Center for Russian Environmental Policy in Moscow, and Vassily Nesterenko and Alexey Nesterenko of the Institute of Radiation Safety, in Minsk, Belarus. The authors examined more than 5,000 published articles and studies, most written in Slavic languages and never before available in English. The authors said, "For the past 23 years, it has been clear that there is a danger greater than nuclear weapons concealed within nuclear power. Emissions from this one reactor exceeded a hundred-fold the radioactive contamination of the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.""

"Last week, a few alternative and environmental news outlets drew attention to a newly published science book that put the cumulative death toll of the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear accident at more than a million-a story that had particular resonance on the 24th anniversary of the reactor meltdown, the book's publication date. But the story did not bleed out into the mainstream media, and even the progressive website Alternet seemed suspicious, calling the 1 million estimate an "astounding allegation" in its headline. The number is dramatically higher than the estimate of 4,000 deaths presented in a 2005 report by the International Atomic Energy Agency, the World Health Organization, and the United Nations Development Program-a figure that has often been criticized as being far too low and influenced by the IAEA's pro-nuclear agenda. Where is the truth here? It's an awfully long way from 4,000 to one million-996,000, in fact. If the truth is somewhere in between the two figures, neither one is of much help to people who are trying to decide whether new nuclear plants-such as those President Obama has proposed-are a safe energy source."

"Japan's TEPCO said Wednesday it had booked an extra $1.1 billion loss to compensate victims of the Fukushima crisis, and would set aside another $473 million to bring the crippled plant under control. In May Tokyo Electric Power Co. reported a $15 billion annual net loss for the year ended March, the biggest ever for a non-financial Japanese firm, on costs related to the world's worst nuclear crisis since Chernobyl in 1986. But on Wednesday it said it would book an additional loss of 88 billion yen ($1.1 billion) to cover compensation related to "psychological distress" suffered by tens of thousands of evacuees from areas near the plant, following calculations by an official government commission."

"While most people trace the dawn of the nuclear era to August 6, 1945, and the dropping of the atomic bomb over the center of Hiroshima, it really began three weeks earlier, in the desert near Alamogordo, New Mexico, with the top-secret Trinity test. Its sixty-fifth anniversary will be marked-or mourned, if you will-this Friday, July 16. Entire books have been written about the test, so I'll just touch on one key issue here briefly (there's much more in my book with Robert Jay Lifton, Hiroshima in America). It's related to a hallmark of the age that would follow: a new government obsession with secrecy, which soon spread from the nuclear program to all military and foreign affairs in the cold war era. In completing their work on building the bomb, Manhattan Project scientists knew it would produce deadly radiation but weren't sure exactly how much. The military planners were mainly concerned about the bomber pilots catching a dose, but J. Robert Oppenheimer, "The Father of the Bomb," worried, with good cause (as it turned out) that the radiation could drift a few miles and also fall to earth with the rain."

"While most people trace the dawn of the nuclear era to August 6, 1945, and the dropping of the atomic bomb over the center of Hiroshima, it really began three weeks earlier, in the desert near Alamogordo, New Mexico, with the top-secret Trinity test. Its sixty-fifth anniversary will be marked -- or mourned, if you will -- tomorrow, July 16. Entire books have been written about the test, so I'll just touch on one key issue here briefly (there's much more in my book with Robert Jay Lifton, Hiroshima in America). It's related to a hallmark of the age that would follow: a new government obsession with secrecy, which soon spread from the nuclear program to all military and foreign affairs in the cold war era."

The author of a book that strikes down uranium exploration in Canada is applauding the New Brunswick government for its recent roadblocks to mining the element in the province. Jim Harding, a retired environmental and justice studies professor and author of Canada's Deadly Secret: Saskatchewan Uranium and the Global Nuclear System, made a stop in Moncton yesterday on a cross-country tour to chastise any move towards mining the radioactive rock. Harding argued the thesis of his book, which flatly states uranium creates more problems than solutions, backing his claim on a timeline of Saskatchewan's mining experience.

ABOUT THIS BOOK Japan's worst nuclear radiation accident took place at a uranium reprocessing facility in Tokaimura, northeast of Tokyo, on 30 September 1999. The direct cause of the accident was cited as the depositing of a uranyl nitrate solution--containing about 16.6 kg of uranium, which exceeded the critical mass--into a precipitation tank. Three workers were exposed to extreme doses of radiation. Hiroshi Ouchi, one of these workers, was transferred to the University of Tokyo Hospital Emergency Room, three days after the accident. Dr. Maekawa and his staff initially thought that Ouchi looked relatively well for a person exposed to such radiation levels. He could talk, and only his right hand was a little swollen with redness. However, his condition gradually weakened as the radioactivity broke down the chromosomes in his cells.

PETER A. BRADFORD, adjunct professor, Vermont Law School, and former member of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission: * For an even-handed recent overview of most nuclear power issues, see "Nuclear Power Joint Fact-Finding," a June 2007 report by the Keystone Center, a non-profit organization that brought together a cross section of parties interested in nuclear energy - including environmentalists and consumer advocates, industry representatives and government officials - to create a base of agreed-upon knowledge about the costs, risks and benefits of nuclear power. www.keystone.org/spp/documents/FinalReport_NJFF6_12_2007(1).pdf * For a responsibly skeptical look at nuclear power's rapidly rising costs in comparison to available low carbon alternatives, see "The Nuclear Illusion" by Amory Lovins and Imram Sheikh in the November 2008 Ambio, the Journal of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. https://www.rmi.org/images/PDFs/Energy/E08-01_AmbioNuclIlusion.pdf The Journal Report * See the complete Energy report. * The Web site of the Nonproliferation Education Center, maintained by WSJ op-ed contributor Henry Sokolski, features an ongoing collection of thoughtful conservative pieces skeptical of nuclear power. http://www.npec-web.org/ * For an excellent short critique of reprocessing and the Bush Administration's Global Nuclear Energy Partnership, see Victor Gilinsky and Alison Macfarlane's Minority Opinion from the National Academy of Science's Review of DoE's Nuclear Research and Development Program, http://books.nap.edu/openbook.php?record_id=11998&page=73 * For an even-handed look at how nuclear construction went astray in the U.S. in the 1970s, the best book remains "Light Water: How the Nuclear Dream Dissolved, Irvin C. Bupp and Jean-Claude Derian. * Another good overview text is Megawatts and Megatons, Richard Garwin and Georges Charpak.

IRVING, Texas--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Fluor Corporation (NYSE:FLR) announced today that the Department of Energy (DOE) confirmed its January 2008 selection of Savannah River Nuclear Solutions, LLC, a Fluor-led team, as the winning bidder for the management and operating (M&O) contract at the Savannah River Site near Aiken, S.C. The estimated $4 billion contract is over a five-year period. Additionally, there are five, one-year renewal options bringing the potential total contract value to $8 billion. To date, no specific contract amounts have been booked into Fluor's backlog. Fluor expects to start booking earnings from the M&O contract into backlog in the third quarter of 2008.