Serhii Plokhy (2022)

A history of nuclear energy in six disasters: five civilian and one military.

Competition seems to lie at the heart of all the problems: a lack of willingness to share details of accidents and near-accidents, and an unwillingness to learn if this requires changes in procedure. Collaboration seems lacking even within organisations and with regulators, while governments treat these matters as merely part of larger strategic concerns (even when they threaten to overwhelm them). It’s also clear that the commercial operation of nuclear power is impossible without state subsidy, and acquiring this opens-up possibilities from regulatory capture – weakening requirements to make them attainable within a fixed cost – to outright bribery.

The science and engineering also seem lacking. The Castle Bravo (and other) nuclear tests massively under-estimate the weapons’ yields, and this seems to be more the case the larger the bomb (culminating in the apocalyptic Tsar Bomba, which isn’t covered in this book as it somewhat miraculously wasn’t actually an accident). But all the systems described make use of technology little changed since the 1930s: imagine if we were still driving cars from that era!

I find Plokhy’s conclusions nuanced but weak. He decides that nuclear and renewable energy sources are both risky approaches to tackling climate change, but with completely different risk profiles: the former perhaps being too slow to start up and with huge accident risks; the latter relying on technologies as yet untested at the necessary scale. But in coming to his conclusion backing renewables and the phasing-out of nuclear stations (with which I entirely agree) he devotes exactly two sentences to the problem of nuclear waste and spent fuel, which should surely be one of the major deciding factors. It’s a strange omission at the end of a book that revolves around radiation hazards.

3/5. Finished Friday 21 October, 2022.

(Originally published on Goodreads.)

Tamsin Calidas (2020)

Moving to an island is many people’s dream (including mine). This is a cautionary tale of the challenges, both inflicted and self-inflicted.

Calidas and her then-husband took the hardest possible route, leaving London to start crofting with sheep and horses. That’s a challenge at any time, but when utterly separated and with no friends or relative nearby it becomes almost impossible. The hostility from the locals varies in intensity from indifference to outright abuse, running into assumptions of who is “allowed” on the island and under what circumstances – a situation that becomes worse when her marriage breaks down and she nevertheless stays and attempts to make things work, something that no-one (including the local women) expects, understands, or supports.

Times change. The later parts of the book show her almost accepted and with a new influx of islanders who are less … well, insular than the original inhabitants.

It’s hard to decide what to take from this book. For a start, it’s unclear how much of the hostility was triggered by Calidas and her husband themselves, not understanding the local sensibilities (although of course it’s also hard to know how they’d’ve learned them). A lot of the tension comes from their efforts at crofting: running a shop would have been easier and perhaps less threatening to others, who felt their life was being intruded-into. But it’s also an indication that moving from anonymous city life to a tiny community means adapting to a way of life that normalises surveillance and comment, and makes it difficult to remain aloof.

3/5. Finished Sunday 16 October, 2022.

(Originally published on Goodreads.)

David Hendy (2013)

A social and scientific history of human sound: not just undesired noise, but how sound binds societies together and how we decide what constitutes “noise” in the first place.

There are some fascinating vignettes. My favourite is the relationship between cave paintings and the soundscapes of the caves in which they’re painted: many of the works occur in locations that are “significant” in the sounds that can be heard, or in the ways that sounds made there reverberate into the wider cave. There’s also a discussion of colonial attitudes to the languages and music of indigenous peoples, and how the contempt for these (as “hellish din”) contributed to the colonists’ disdain for them.

As someone who loves silence, there are also some explorations that were awkward and discomforting for me, as to how the ability to find silence is a manifestation of “othering” others in society, and regarding their sounds as encroaching and unwanted. There’s also a sense that the pursuits one enjoys in silence – like reading – often come about because the noise of their construction has been offloaded elsewhere, to impact on other people.

As to “noise”, it seems to boil down to whether the sounds being heard are perceived as being made by “us” or “them”, and to what extent we can exercise some control over them. That makes sound a part of the wider behaviour of a society: if we are all “us”, then we will tackle excess sound differently than if those sounds are being made by a “them”. In that sense, noise complaints are a measure of social cohesiveness and our willingness to rub along well with others.

4/5. Finished Saturday 15 October, 2022.

(Originally published on Goodreads.)

Patrick Radden Keefe (2021)

If there was ever a story that demonstrated one rule for the rich and another for the poor, this is it.

The Sackler dynasty has had a huge social prominence, with its name adorning university medical research institutes and wings of art galleries. The wealth all came from selling oxycontin, one of the most potent painkillers available and a boon to many with chronic pain. Their innovation was to own the company that developed a slow-release mechanism to allow a morphine derivative to be delivered orally. All this is a great service to humanity.

But… In Keefe’s telling, the way oxycontin was sold made no attempt to ensure that it wasn’t being over-prescribed or abused, and indeed targeted doctor and pharmacists who were clearly off-loading more pills that their communities could possibly need. And it’s hard to believe that the company didn’t know this, given that they’d also been early investors in medical information collection and analysis that could spot such patterns. The rest of the story degenerates into legal wranglings designed to keep the Sackler name out of any court decisions and away from personal blame.

It’s a troubling history that taints what should have been a clear and welcome medical breakthrough by the search for enormous profits by any means.

5/5. Finished Tuesday 6 September, 2022.

(Originally published on Goodreads.)