Digital List Price:	$17.99
Kindle Price:	$2.99 Save $15.00 (83%)
Sold by:	Amazon.com Services LLC

Read with our free app

You've subscribed to ! We will preorder your items within 24 hours of when they become available. When new books are released, we'll charge your default payment method for the lowest price available during the pre-order period.

Update your device or payment method, cancel individual pre-orders or your subscription at
Your Memberships & Subscriptions

There was an error. We were unable to process your subscription due to an error. Please refresh and try again.

Follow the author

Helen Caldicott

+ Follow

More books from this author

Nuclear Power Is Not the Answer Kindle Edition

by Helen Caldicott (Author) Format: Kindle Edition

3.6 57 ratings

See all formats and editions

The renowned antinuclear activist delivers a “frighteningly convincing argument” against nuclear energy as a solution to climate change (Publishers Weekly).

In a world torn apart by wars over oil, politicians have stepped up their search for alternative energy sources—and their leading choice is nuclear energy. But nuclear energy’s popularity as a green alternative is based on misinformation. People claim that nuclear-powered electricity does not cause global warming or pollution, that it is inexpensive, and that it is safe. These claims, as Helen Caldicott demonstrates, are untrue.

In Nuclear Power Is Not the Answer, Caldicott digs beneath the nuclear industry’s propaganda to examine the actual costs and environmental consequences of nuclear energy. In fact, nuclear power does contribute to global warming; the cost is prohibitive, with taxpayers picking up most of the tab; there’s not enough uranium in the world to sustain it over the long term; and the potential for a catastrophic accident or a terrorist attack far outweighs any benefits. In concluding chapters, Caldicott details alternative sustainable energy sources that are the key to a clean, green future.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Caldecott's latest antinuke book searingly debunks the claim that the impending "nuclear power renaissance," purported by some to be the only answer to global warming, is "clean and green." She covers all the bases, from the carbon emitted in the creation of nuclear power (higher than fossil fuels if the entire process from uranium mining to waste disposal is included) to the cost of nuclear plants (too high to be viable without large government subsidies) and the health risks and possibility of accidents and terrorists' access (more than we'd like to think). She also points out that, despite proponents' assurances, we still haven't found a safe place to store the waste materials for the necessary thousands of years, and that state-of-the-art nuclear plant technology is still full of unresolved problems. Caldecott's predictable alternative is also sensible: switch to wind and other benign renewables, turn down the thermostat, wear a sweater, use energy efficient lights and dry clothes on the clothesline. Detractors will complain that she is strident and incendiary, but those who believe that facts matter will want to read her frighteningly convincing argument. (Sept.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist

Never one to mince words, renowned physician and activist Caldicott presents exhaustive evidence to refute the now-resurgent claim that nuclear power is the solution to global warming. Eschewing hyperbole and speculation, Caldicott diligently presents the facts about the grave problems attendant on nuclear power. For starters, enormous amounts of fossil fuel are burned during the nuclear-energy process, and nuclear reactors use and pollute vast amounts of water. Radioactive emissions do escape and are released from nuclear facilities, and man-made radioactive elements regularly enter the food chain and our bodies to deleterious effect. Nuclear-power plants are vulnerable to natural disasters and to terrorists; all nuclear plants generate plutonium, seeding the proliferation of nuclear weapons; and we have yet to discover a safe place or method for storing waste that remains deadly for millennia. Add to that the scandalously corrupt and hypocritical economics and politics of nuclear power. So numerous and so severe are the problems Caldicott precisely records and clearly interprets that, as it stands today, nuclear power would appear to be a costly, dangerous, even ludicrous technology. Donna Seaman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Product details

ASIN ‏ : ‎ B003UBAWYU
Publisher ‏ : ‎ The New Press (September 1, 2007)
Publication date ‏ : ‎ September 1, 2007
Language ‏ : ‎ English
File size ‏ : ‎ 2686 KB
Text-to-Speech ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Screen Reader ‏ : ‎ Supported
Enhanced typesetting ‏ : ‎ Enabled
X-Ray ‏ : ‎ Not Enabled
Word Wise ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Sticky notes ‏ : ‎ On Kindle Scribe
Print length ‏ : ‎ 236 pages

Best Sellers Rank: #1,318,292 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
- #49 in Energy Policy (Kindle Store)
- #61 in Nuclear Engineering (Kindle Store)
- #114 in Energy Policy (Books)

Customer Reviews:
3.6 57 ratings

Brief content visible, double tap to read full content.

Full content visible, double tap to read brief content.

Videos

Help others learn more about this product by uploading a video!

Upload your video

About the author

Follow authors to get new release updates, plus improved recommendations.

Helen Caldicott

Brief content visible, double tap to read full content.

Full content visible, double tap to read brief content.

Discover more of the author’s books, see similar authors, read author blogs and more

Customer reviews

3.6 out of 5

57 global ratings

How customer reviews and ratings work

Sort reviews by

Top reviews from the United States

There was a problem filtering reviews right now. Please try again later.

Satya Newday

Most Referenced and Broadest lay-person book on the topic

Reviewed in the United States on July 14, 2009

Verified Purchase

Halfway into this book I realized the breadth of issues at stake. Helen delineates and demonstrates the many faces of the issues posed by a deadly toxic to generate electricity. As you got into the book, I also found much of work carefully referenced.

What prompted me to write this review is what I found to be the horrid science used by the negative reviewers, who offer no references while arguing Caldicott's work. Also, while dicing her excellent work, none of negative reviews I read take up most significant fact that Helen points out. Nuclear waste is not just toxic for 50,000 year, but Caldicott's respected sources say that it is a dangerous poison for hundreds of thousands of years.

While I have a MS degree, which trained me to understand the scientific process, I also stake my opinions on my experiences. Before I trained in cyber security I had been a trained mechanic and then a carpenter and builder. My analytical skills were first honed through trouble shooting system and structural problems. This book is consistent and systematically outlines the issues at stake.

Helen Caldicott's book also raises significant questions that seem common sense to me. How do you keep a deadly toxic material safe for hundreds of thousand of years? What has history, archeology, and the science o f corrosion resistance and structural building materials, as well as the shifting plates of the earth's crust tell us? Caldicott's book has led me to think of such things. It also addresses what it is that you need to keep stored nuclear waste safe from. Further more it covers "how are we doing right now"? How safe is our current stock pile of nuclear waste? What are the current threats to our stock? How have our short term waste facilities been designed and what are the ramification considering it current state?

Helen Caldicott's book suggests that any long term solution needs be a reasonable consensus of the recognized experts in the fields in question. Experts need to be in fields of where we put the stuff, i.e. the earth's crust. Who can say where is a guaranteed, beyond a reasonable doubt, stable - for hundreds of thousands of years - place is? Other experts needed are in the fields of how we build the containers. What kind of engineering is qualified to make a 100,000s of years determination?

After reading the negative reviews of Helen's work, it becomes apparent that the toxicity of nuclear waste is the elephant in the room. It seemed to me that Helen's research indicates that proponents of nuclear power simply do not demonstrate a conscience regarding the threat. Please, look into this; it is not just the human race, right?

While the book looks at the issues through scientific and socialistic prisms, the content can easily apply to a meaningful consider of the religious point of view. If mankind was given the dominion (responsibility for) over all the rest (animals and plants, say), are we doing a conscientious job? Also one could consider the spiritual; are we acting with responsibility unto 10 generations forward? Does that responsibility need a "beyond-a-reasonable-doubt" set of actions?
A good argument can be made that because of fear of changing the status quo it more than 30 years for the established science community to accept that the evidence proves beyond a reasonable doubt that the level of pollution we are generating - creating status quo electricity - is not sustainable (accolades to Al Gore) i.e. we may kill ourselves and the planet doing it. It is evident that some of the educated community feels so threatened by these facts that they are blind to science when it comes to where they have committed their hopes in maintaining the status quo.

I have even heard public proponents of nuclear dismiss the reasonable fear of toxicity, saying it is just 300 years! And how does that happen? Most of us know that you don't need to be scientist or a priest to answer that. Most lobbyists find there livelihood in promoting their agenda. With a few exceptions, Helen does a thorough job of providing references for the information her book provides. The detractors have much to say of what is wrong and what they think is right information. Unlike most of Helens work, they offer no references that we can follow through on. This kind of work is never accepted in science journals. So how is it that people claiming to be well versed in science and knock Helen's research, do not follow with the scientific method, as she does, for their detractions?

Please read the book, check the science for yourself. We need an informed democracy. Check the sources that Helen uses. Are they respected scientists in their fields? This is an important issue, so if you doubt the science, check out that resource before taking a stand.

Cheers

19 people found this helpful

Helpful

Hill Country Bob

Very anti nuclear book

Reviewed in the United States on November 30, 2013

Verified Purchase

Ms. Caldicott is very much opposed to nuclear power, and this book is about her objections to nuclear power. She is certainly entitled to her opinion and her opposition to nuclear power.

However, as the late United States Senator and Ambassador Daniel Patrick Moynihan said: “Everyone is entitled to your own opinion. You are not entitled to your own facts”.

On the first page of the introduction is the statement: “As this book will show, no part of “efficiently, safely, and with no discharge of greenhouse gases or emission” is true.”

The issues of nuclear efficiency and safety are addressed below.

Efficiency - Cost: Addressing the efficiency issue, I will assume that cost is related to efficiency. The US Energy Information Agency has provided cost estimates for the future, for plants entering service in 2018. The cost estimates include the cost to build the plant, and to operate the facility. The following data comes from that source. In this table, only the columns on type system, plant capacity and total system levelized cost are given. Omitted for simplicity are: Levelized capital cost, Fixed O&M, Variable O&M (including fuel), and Transmission investment.

Table 1. Estimated levelized cost of new generation resources,
2018 U.S. average levelized costs (2011 $/megawatthour) for plants entering service in 2018

Dispatchable Technologies

Conventional Coal 85%, 100.1;
Advanced Coal 85% 123.0;
Advanced Coal with CC 85% 135.5;
Natural Gas:
Conventional Combined Cycle 87% 67.1:
Advanced Combined Cycle 87% 56.6;
Advanced CC with CCS 87% 93.4;
Conventional Combustion Turbine 30% 130.3;
Advanced Combustion Turbine 30% 104.6;
Advanced Nuclear 90% 108.4;
Geothermal 92% 89.6;
Biomass 83% 111.0;

Non-Dispatchable Technologies;
Wind 34% 86.6:
Wind - Offshore 37% 221.5;
Solar PV 25% 144.3;
Solar Thermal 20% 261.5;
Hydro 52% 90.3.

There is another article on the web by the Breakthrough Institute titled:
“Cost of German Solar four times Finnish Nuclear”
subtitled: “Olkiluoto Nuclear Plant, Plagued by Budget Overruns, Still Beats Germany’s Energiewende

“Germany’s solar program will generate electricity at quadruple the cost of one of the most expensive nuclear power plants in the world, according to a new Breakthrough Institute analysis, raising serious questions about a renewable energy strategy widely heralded as a global model.

“The findings challenge the idea that solar photovoltaic is a disruptive, scalable, “shelf-ready” technology with a cost advantage over nuclear. Energy analysts frequently point to Finland’s advanced nuclear project at Olkiluoto, which is seven years behind schedule and billions of dollars over budget, and solar in Germany as indicative of future cost trends working against new nuclear technologies and in favor of solar.

“Proponents of Germany’s Energiewende, which now involves jettisoning the country’s nuclear fleet by 2023, argue that solar and wind can make up the difference in lost capacity. A straightforward cost comparison between the two programs over the same 20-year period, however, reveals the costs of this proposition.

“The Finnish European pressurized reactor (EPR), with an estimated total cost of $15 billion, will generate over half as much energy as the entire existing German solar program, which will run to roughly $130 billion. The total cost of electricity produced by German solar will be 32 cents per kilowatt-hour versus 7 cents per kilowatt-hour for the Areva-Siemens nuclear plant in Finland — a more than four-fold difference. Two such nuclear plants would generate slightly more than Germany’s solar panels, at less than a fourth the total cost.”

SAFETY: Addressing just the safety issue, one common way to address system safety is by looking at the number of deaths. I am assuming that we all wish to have electricity in our society, and thus looking at the death rates associated with the different methods of generation of electricity appears appropriate. There is an article by Willem Post on the web at a site called Next Big Future from March 13, 2011 Deaths per TWH (Terawatt Hour) by energy source: (---nextbigfuture.com/2011/03/deaths-per-twh-by-energy-source...)

“It says: Comparing deaths/TWh for all energy sources

“I wrote this back in 2008 and with one new death that is somewhat nuclear energy related (a death at one of the japanese nuclear plants following the 8.9 earthquake) the statistics are not changed. Japan should have had sealed backup diesel generators or updated some of their designs. However, nuclear still compares very, very well to the other energy sources. The air pollution data is mainly from the World Health Organization and the european study Externe. The World Health Organization compiled peer reviewed health studies on air pollution from many institutions. Occupational health and safety statistics track the deaths of workers in the different industries.

“Correction on the coal deaths per TWH for China.
“Energy Source Death Rate (deaths per TWh) CORRECTED

Coal (elect, heat,cook –world avg) 100 (26% of world energy, 50% of electricity)
Coal electricity – world avg 60 (26% of world energy, 50% of electricity)
Coal (elect,heat,cook)– China 170
Coal electricity- China 90
Coal – USA 15
Oil 36 (36% of world energy)
Natural Gas 4 (21% of world energy)
Biofuel/Biomass 12
Peat 12
Solar (rooftop) 0.44 (0.2% of world energy for all solar)
Wind 0.15 (1.6% of world energy)
Nuclear 0.04

An interesting and informative book is: "Before it's Too Late A Scientist's Case for Nuclear Energy by Bernard L. Cohen written in 1983 which provides a good deal of still relevant information. Dr. Cohen was a professor of Physics at Univ of Pittsburgh. He was Chairman of the American Physical Society Division of Nuclear Physics and Chairman of the American Nuclear Society Division of Environmental Sciences. He wrote over 200 papers and articles for popular journals such as Science Digest, Consumer's Research, Scientific American etc. He wrote three books. He tried very hard to educate Americans about nuclear power and how it could be a great benefit, and why. He addressed all of the hazards. He worked to get the media to cover the topic and offered them all the assistance he and others in the community could provide. Unfortunately, the media was not really interested in educating the American people, but rather was interested in sensationalism. The anti nuclear community had all of the sensationalism, and did not really care if what they said was the truth, but only cared that it was widely publicized. Dr. Cohen's efforts to get out the rather boring facts were not of interest to the media, as the facts did not make for sensational headlines. Thus, he finally quit giving talks and wrote this very informative book. If you have an open mind and really want to understand the issues, "Before it's Too Late" will help you to understand.

23 people found this helpful

Helpful

Roark

Nuclear Power Is Not the Answer -- The Title Says it All !

Reviewed in the United States on September 17, 2006

Verified Purchase

Dr. Helen Caldicott, has written another incredible book! In her magnificent book, Helen shows us:

·Why the claim that nuclear energy is clean and green is very misleading.

·How dangereous it is for the individuals involved in the production of the fuel for nuclear reactors and how devastating it can be for the environment.

·That nuclear energy is not nearly as affordable or competitive with other energies as we have been lead to believe.

·The possibility of a meltdown at any nuclear power plant currently running is very real, and that there have been several very close calls in recent years, putting literally thousands if not millions of peoples' lives at risk.

·How nuclear power plants can contribute to the proliferation of nuclear weapons!!

On a brighter note, we learn that:

·Renewable energy promises much more in the way of generating electricity for the world than the nuclear folks would have us believe.

·There is enough wind just between the Rocky Mountains and the Mississippi River to meet the electricity needs of the entire U.S., three times over.

·Impressive advances in photovoltaic technology, which generates sunlight directly into electricity, have been made in recent years.

Compelling, well written and easy to read, I highly recommend "Nuclear Power Is Not The Answer," in which Helen explains clearly how expensive nuclear energy actually is and always will be! Certainly a must read for everyone!

26 people found this helpful

Helpful

Top reviews from other countries

Translate all reviews to English

S. Webster

Easy to read style

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on January 12, 2016

Verified Purchase

Bought this book after watching Youtube lectures by the Author. Excellent follow up. Informative in a simple to understand style.

Antonio Soligo

Un bel modo di scrivere

Reviewed in Italy on February 15, 2013

Verified Purchase

Non conoscevo questa signora ma ha un modo semplice e pacato di esporre le proprie idee.
Ha il coraggio di ciò che dice è questo mi piace.

Translate review to English

Amazon Customer

Five Stars

Reviewed in Australia on April 4, 2015

Verified Purchase

Makes you realise how bad the Fukushima meltdown is and how it will continue to affect the world.

Roark

Nuclear Power is Not the Answer -- The Title Says it All !

Reviewed in Canada on September 18, 2006

Verified Purchase

Dr. Helen Caldicott, has written another incredible book! In her magnificent book, Helen shows us:

·Why the claim that nuclear energy is clean and green is very misleading.

·How dangereous it is for the individuals involved in the production of the fuel for nuclear reactors and how devastating it can be for the environment.

·That nuclear energy is not nearly as affordable or competitive with other energies as we have been lead to believe.

·The possibility of a meltdown at any nuclear power plant currently running is very real, and that there have been several very close calls in recent years, putting literally thousands if not millions of peoples' lives at risk.

·How nuclear power plants can contribute to the proliferation of nuclear weapons!!

On a brighter note, we learn that:

·Renewable energy promises much more in the way of generating electricity for the world than the nuclear folks would have us believe.

·There is enough wind just between the Rocky Mountains and the Mississippi River to meet the electricity needs of the entire U.S., three times over.

·Impressive advances in photovoltaic technology, which generates sunlight directly into electricity, have been made in recent years.

Compelling, well written and easy to read, I highly recommend "Nuclear Power Is Not The Answer," in which Helen explains clearly how expensive nuclear energy actually is and always will be! Certainly a must read for everyone!

5 people found this helpful

greg

Alternate Facts provided by Helen

Reviewed in Canada on June 2, 2019

Verified Purchase

I thought the author was off on a tangent relating the land area required to power the US economy for both solar and wind Facts ??

Buy for others

Buying and sending eBooks to others

Follow the author

Image Unavailable

Nuclear Power Is Not the Answer Kindle Edition

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

From Booklist

Review

About the Author

Product details

Videos

About the author

Helen Caldicott

Customer reviews

Top reviews from the United States

There was a problem filtering reviews right now. Please try again later.

Top reviews from other countries