The Doomsday Machine: The High Price of Nuclear Energy, the World's Most Dangerous Fuel

by Martin Cohen, Andrew McKillop

Today, there are over one hundred nuclear reactors operating in our backyards, from Indian Point in New York to Diablo Canyon in California. Proponents claim that nuclear power is the only viable alternative to fossil fuels, and due to rising energy consumption and the looming threat of global warming, they are pushing for an even greater investment. Here, energy economist Andrew McKillop and social scientist Martin Cohen argue that the nuclear power dream being sold to us is pure fantasy. Debunking the multilayered myth that nuclear energy is cheap, clean, and safe, they demonstrate how landscapes are ravaged in search of the elusive yellowcake to fuel the reactors, and how energy companies and politicians rarely discuss the true costs of nuclear power plants€”from the subsidies that build the infrastructure to the unspoken that the public will pick up the cleanup cost in the event of a meltdown, which can easily top $100 billion dollars.

256 pages, Hardcover

First published March 27, 2012

About the author

Martin Cohen is a well-established author specializing in popular books in philosophy, social science and politics.

I have a book being published November 2018 on the sociology of food this year, called provocatively 'I Think Therefore I Eat'! with an emphasis on how historical philosophers have approached the 'food issue'. It's a popular 'explainer' kind of book, already given a nice plug by Eater!

Food is very much an interdisciplinary area - though it is often treated in a narrow, specialised way. There is the nutritionist's perspective, the economist's, the cook's, the ecological... the list is as long as we want. And each perspective is 'valid', but only partial. So I think it's a good place to bring in a little philosophy.

Part of the book looks at the historical views of well-known philosophers on food (they have indeed had some!) but most of it looks at modern theories which are still philosophical in a fundamental sense, including for example, the ideas that we are living in an 'obesogenic' environment, or that our bodies, far from being guided by a single essential soul, are really constructed out of an uneasy alliance of micro-organisms.

It's published by Turner in the US mid-November, and this is their page for the book including my video trailer if you would like to see a little movie!

For rights inquiries, please contact my literary agent:

Mark Gottlieb
Literary Agent
Trident Media Group
mgottlieb@tridentmediagroup.com
(212) 333-1506
https://www.tridentmediagroup.com/

So, the book contains analysis of many current food-related debates,
including the vexed question of the obesity epidemic, which is much more complicated than merely people eating the wrong things, a fact that won't surprise many of us have explored by trying to go on a diet ourselves!

But perhaps the 'USP element' in it is more on what those venerable philosophy gurus had to say anyway. On the social science side, these two extracts give the flavour:

1. If you went by TV and the newspapers, you could be forgiven for thinking that celebrities, be they chefs or models, have more of a handle on the key food issues than qualified doctors and nutritionists – let alone philosophers. And you might well be right. Because the worst thing about food science, the elephant in the room, is that it’s not just the opinions that are changing – but the ‘facts’ themselves shift too. To get to the bottom of the food question. requires us to tease apart the strands of diet science and biochemistry, as well as an ounce of economics and a dash of human psychology.

Rather the obesity epidemic is an economic issue as I put in back in 2016 in an article for the Guardian newspaper. "The causes of the epidemic are complex, spanning the social sciences to biology and technology"

I took the same issue a bit further when I compared figures for childhood obesity - and found more evidence that, as I wrote, "It's poverty, not individual choice, that is driving extraordinary obesity ..."

Incidentally, the same sort of disgraceful thing applies to educational achievement. Did you know, that you can pretty much do away with exams (hooray!), as exam results mimic exactly a student's position in the class hierarchy (boo!). Shocking and disgraceful and no one - of course - s gong to do anything about it.

So that's really the the Politics of Food Science – as I put it for Gavin Wren's fabulous Brain Food Magazine at Medium , wri

Reviews

[Rebecca · Rating 3 out of 5]

With a title like this one, you know exactly what you are getting into. This book is vehemently anti-nuclear. The authors debunk established "facts" about nuclear power in each chapter; like the idea that it is a green energy, or low cost. Even though the book isn't long, parts of it were very dense, especially while discussing the true cost of nuclear in terms of kilowatt hours. It covers the major nuclear accidents, and takes the stance that the true cost in terms of cancers and deaths is being covered up my multiple agencies for the sake of the industry. What surprised me most, was how much the author disparaged other green energy ideas like wind and solar. By the end, the book has concluded that pretty much all of the green energy alternatives are pointless, but provides no ideas to help solve the energy problem. While the book is full of good information on the true costs of nuclear in various terms, I was slightly frustrated that all other alternatives were criticized with no suggestions for any kind of solution.

[Jaime Berrio · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book is what happens when someone who thinks and talks like a economist acts like if he was a nuclear physicist or a nuclear chemist. It’s just a overly long essay in which you just don’t know what the guy’s thesis is.

[Karin Christo · Rating 5 out of 5]

A must read

[George · Rating 4 out of 5]

This a great book, and it helped me out in my research a lot, giving be both general topics and specific details about nuclear power. It had many details that I could use to better write my research.