Power to Save the World (eBook)

Gwyneth Cravens (Autor)

eBook Download: EPUB

2010 | 1. Auflage
464 Seiten
Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group (Verlag)
978-0-307-26856-3 (ISBN)

Infos

An informed look at the myths and fears surrounding nuclear energy, and a practical, politically realistic solution to global warming and our energy needs. Faced by the world's oil shortages and curious about alternative energy sources, Gwyneth Cravens skeptically sets out to find the truth about nuclear energy. Her conclusion: it is a totally viable and practical solution to global warming. In the end, we see that if we are to care for subsequent generations, embracing nuclear energy is an ethical imperative.

Textauszug

Images of exploding nuclear bombs gave me nightmares when I was a child. And I would often be startled awake by the roar of fighter jets splitting the sky. Were the Soviets finally attacking Albuquerque, my hometown? I'd once watched a television show about what would happen to America if the Russians bombed us--a crowd of upturned faces, a blast of white light incinerating them--then had run outside in search of cover. Our school faced the nearby Sandia Mountains, their tall facade like a cutout made of blue construction paper. One day at recess as my best friend, Peggy Smith, and I were talking about how we loved them, she told me that she'd overheard her father, an engineer at Sandia National Laboratories who made frequent trips to the atomic test site in Nevada, tell her mother top-secret information: one of those mountains had been hollowed out and filled with thousands of atomic weapons. I pictured a vaulted cavern filled with row after row of big, white, egg-shaped bombs, looking just like the replicas of the ones dropped on Japan that were always displayed at Kirtland Air Force Base on Armed Forces Day along with a battery of real missiles pointed skyward. When I was about eleven, I compared notes on the nuclear threat with Janet Johnson, my neighbor and pal. She had heard from some Los Alamos kids that Albuquerque was the Soviet Union's number one target in the Western Hemisphere. That had to be because of the hollow mountain full of nuclear weapons. As every schoolchild in New Mexico knew, the first atomic bomb in the world had been tested in the southern part of the state. Janet and I paged through Life magazine's photo spreads of the ruins of two Japanese cities, of multicolored mushroom clouds, of life-size dolls flung around in dust storms inside living rooms as houses imploded during atomic tests. We estimated that, living as we did on the edge of town, far from the base and the labs, and on the last street before the open mesa, we'd probably survive the explosion and could save our poor parents, who downplayed the impending catastrophe to us and were not prepared for it. But we made a plan, and the preliminaries for it consumed one summer. Carrying shovels, we set out barefoot across the mesa, with its fragrant sagebrush, rippling grama grass, and cholla and prickly pear cactus, to a nearby arroyo. There we began scooping out a refuge in pinkish gravel and clay among the roots of a clump of rabbitbrush. Our mothers wouldn't let us bring blankets or canned goods to this hole in the ground, but we did store bottles of water there as well as cloth bags we sewed and stuffed with matches, Band-Aids, packets of rice, tapioca, and tea, and knives that we carved out of bamboo that grew in my yard. On a hot day we'd lie in the cool hollow and gaze up at the sky, with its circling hawks, big thunderheads, and fighter jets. Besides plotting our survival strategy, we read science fiction. For us the future was divided into two visions, and in discussions of them, we often used the word conceivably. We saw ourselves thriving as scientists in a prosperous utopia with atoms as a source of energy that would power our airborne cars. Wearing beautiful dresses made of miracle fabrics, we'd fly to the moon and Mars in atomic rockets piloted by our handsome husbands. At the same time we worried that World War III might reduce our country, starting with Albuquerque, to a smoldering, radioactive wasteland. Then we'd have to subsist the way humans did during the Stone Age. If and when we felt the initial shock wave from an exploding warhead, we planned to grab our family members and pets, and run as fast as possible to our...

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 1.12.2010
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Naturwissenschaften ► Physik / Astronomie
• Themenwelt: Recht / Steuern ► Öffentliches Recht
• Themenwelt: Sozialwissenschaften ► Politik / Verwaltung
• Themenwelt: Technik ► Elektrotechnik / Energietechnik
• ISBN-10: 0-307-26856-X / 030726856X
• ISBN-13: 978-0-307-26856-3 / 9780307268563