Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1338262 in Books
• Published on: 1984-04-01
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback

Customer Reviews

Very informative, if dated, book
Fuller deals very well with the complexities and the failures of the US's first commercial liqiud metal fast breeder reactor. In particular, he is very careful to contrast this advanced but inherently more dangerous design with the common light water reactors nearly everywhere else in the US and abroad. This book IS dated - post 3 Mile Island many reactors in the US had their entire controls systems updated to avoid operator errors and inefficiencies - but the failure of design and operation processes that occured (such as non-documented design changes that didn't make the "final" plans and eventually resulted in the accident!) are still with us today. A good book, and fairly even in treatment, despite a highly cautionary tone.

We almost lost . . . a secret.
Granted the book is a bit sensational - then again I lived in Detroit at that time and you can bet I would have been hyper-ventilating had I known the China Syndrome was potentiating less than 60 miles away.

Here's the key point: if this was such an itty-bitty bang why was it NEVER mentioned until this book was published?

Rancho Seco, Celilo Village, the Hanford site, 3-mile Island, the USS Thresher -- all nuclear events that blew up in the press for days or weeks - yet NEVER CALLED FORTH A SINGLE MENTION OF FERMI #1.

Sounds like a cover-up to me - and the casual mention that 'a little bit of the core melted' is no small matter - if a little melts, a lot is not far behind and Bang! There goes Detroit!

Worth a read? Yeah. Worth paying attention to the neighborhood, too.

Worth Reading...
As someone that can see the steam towers of Fermi 2 from my driveway, I was very interested in this book. Although it is very outdated and quite biased, it did turn me on to some reactor accidents I hadn't heard of and gave me a little more history of the area I live in. The accident at Fermi 1 was actually pretty small and the plant still runs (actually visited it 5 years ago). A good place to start if you are interested in this kind of thing and the book sells pretty cheap so it is worth the small amount of money.