What do you think?
Rate this book
Prométheus v plamenech
Pozoruhodný román o havárii gigantické atomové elektrárny v severní Kalifornii.
Elektrárna má být dána co nejdříve do provozu, protože anergetická síť v USA je přetížena a včasné zahájení provozu je také důkazem úspěšného plnění vládního programu. Stavitelé a ředitel elektrárny marně upozorňují na nedokonale vyzkoušený provoz. Osobní a politické zájmy se střetávají s pocitem zodpovědnosti, protože zapojení reaktorů může vést k atomovému výbuchu. K zahájení provozu se sejdou reportéži i vládní činitelé a jsou svědky dramatu jednotlivců i celé stavby, boje lidí, kteří se marně snaží zabránit neštěstí.
Elektrárna má být dána co nejdříve do provozu, protože anergetická síť v USA je přetížena a včasné zahájení provozu je také důkazem úspěšného plnění vládního programu. Stavitelé a ředitel elektrárny marně upozorňují na nedokonale vyzkoušený provoz. Osobní a politické zájmy se střetávají s pocitem zodpovědnosti, protože zapojení reaktorů může vést k atomovému výbuchu. K zahájení provozu se sejdou reportéži i vládní činitelé a jsou svědky dramatu jednotlivců i celé stavby, boje lidí, kteří se marně snaží zabránit neštěstí.
299 pages, Paperback
First published June 1, 1975
10 people are currently reading
161 people want to read
About the author
Thomas N. Scortia
54 books12 followersThomas Nicholas Scortia was a science fiction author. He worked in the American aerospace industry until the late 1960s/early 1970s. He collaborated on several works with fellow author Frank M. Robinson. He sometimes used the pseudonyms Scott Nichols, Gerald MacDow, and Arthur R. Kurtz.
Scortia was born in Alton, Illinois. He attended Washington University in St. Louis, where he earned a degree in chemistry in 1949. He worked for a number of aerospace companies during the 1950s and 1960s, and held a patent for the fuel used by one of the Jupiter fly-by missions.
Scortia had been writing in his spare time while still working in the aerospace field. When the industry began to see increased unemployment in the early 1970s, Scortia decided to try his hand at full-time writing. His first novel, The Glass Inferno (in collaboration with Frank M. Robinson) was the inspiration for the 1974 film The Towering Inferno. Scortia also collaborated with Dalton Trumbo on the novel The Endangered Species.
Scortia died of leukemia in La Verne, California on April 29, 1986.
Scortia was born in Alton, Illinois. He attended Washington University in St. Louis, where he earned a degree in chemistry in 1949. He worked for a number of aerospace companies during the 1950s and 1960s, and held a patent for the fuel used by one of the Jupiter fly-by missions.
Scortia had been writing in his spare time while still working in the aerospace field. When the industry began to see increased unemployment in the early 1970s, Scortia decided to try his hand at full-time writing. His first novel, The Glass Inferno (in collaboration with Frank M. Robinson) was the inspiration for the 1974 film The Towering Inferno. Scortia also collaborated with Dalton Trumbo on the novel The Endangered Species.
Scortia died of leukemia in La Verne, California on April 29, 1986.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 20 of 20 reviews
October 12, 2016
Okay this is an impressive book - yes it has its flaws but to think you have a book written in the 70s which lays out what happens when an ill prepared nuclear incident happens at a location painfully close to a highly populated location.
Now I am not going to get embroiled in the should we / shouldn't we argument over nuclear power as that is a debate for people far cleverer than I am and far more responsible too. No what grabs me is that the scenes as they play out, the reactions of people involved and the impact it all has, be in the 70s or now it seems very little has changed.
Now yes there are aspects of the books that show both its age and the attitudes of the authors involved but the premise and a stark and sometimes clinical technical nature of what is going on takes what some might say a fantastical and impossible situation and make it all the more real.
I think for me there are two types of disaster story - those that are only possible when perfect conditions arrive and you would hope that if they ever did occur the likelihood of them happening again are next to zero. Then there is the other type which regardless of when the story is set it does not take too great a leap of the imagination to change the setting and place yourself in the heart of the disaster - and those for me are the most chilling.
Now I am not going to get embroiled in the should we / shouldn't we argument over nuclear power as that is a debate for people far cleverer than I am and far more responsible too. No what grabs me is that the scenes as they play out, the reactions of people involved and the impact it all has, be in the 70s or now it seems very little has changed.
Now yes there are aspects of the books that show both its age and the attitudes of the authors involved but the premise and a stark and sometimes clinical technical nature of what is going on takes what some might say a fantastical and impossible situation and make it all the more real.
I think for me there are two types of disaster story - those that are only possible when perfect conditions arrive and you would hope that if they ever did occur the likelihood of them happening again are next to zero. Then there is the other type which regardless of when the story is set it does not take too great a leap of the imagination to change the setting and place yourself in the heart of the disaster - and those for me are the most chilling.
February 25, 2022
This is the second time I have read this book. The first time was in 1975. It is still a great book even though the seventies had such dark resolutions with the ending of their novels. In fact, I have a handful of books that are archived in my library, like this one, and I look forward to re-reading them for old times sake this year.
February 21, 2013
This book would still be relevant today, amazing when you consider I first read it in 1976. All about greed, terrorism, shortcuts and nuclear power and the damage those things together can do. Starts a tad slow, but before long you are racing to a gripping and scary conclusion.
January 16, 2012
In the late sixties the American Power Company's subsidiary, Indiana & Michigan, started construction of a dual reactor about a mile north of grandmother's cottage in SW Michigan. They'd owned a parcel since the fifties, but started the process of buying up surrounding lands a few years before, using threats and intimidation against long-time neighbors while filling the local papers with glowing reports of how the plant, settled behind a wall of forested dunes from the lake, would provide miles of publicly accessible beach frontage. A diorama pictured this very attractively.
The plant was finished in the early seventies, right up alongside the beach. The process of construction had involved building a huge artificial harbor projecting into the water which collected the sands which would normally have drifted southward along its north end. Consequently, everyone for a couple of miles to the south lost beach and dunes, many their water pumps. The residents so affected began a collective lawsuit against the I&M which dragged on expensively for almost a decade until being settled out of court, our pockets being empty. It was ugly. My college and first graduate school years had me reading hundreds of pages of depositions and scientific studies every time I came home from school.
Because of the lack of any safe depository for nuclear waste, the spent fuel rods are kept in cement housings in small ponds surrounded by chain link fences in the woods, ponds that anyone can simply walk to in a few minutes from the county road serving as the southern boundary of I&M land. Because the plant wasn't set back, years of high lake levels led to the waves striking its very base, forcing the company to pile up rip-rap and pour cement in front of the doubled retaining walls. Because the retaining walls retain, the whole forest behind the plant and to both sides of it flooded. We lost our own road to this. Now, with 9-ll, the whole area, hundreds of acres, has been surrounded by large, easily moveable white boulders to prevent motorized intrusion and the low-paid private security guards (the cause of most of the theft at the plant) have been provided with black uniforms, flak jackets and automatic weapons. Meanwhile, the beach too has been blocked off on both ends by large pillars--so much for public access--and warnings that trespassers will be shot. Of course, one can still walk over to the fuel rod ponds or even to the plant itself as the aforementioned guards rarely leave their vehicles and many of them are in such physical shape that a walk up a hill would constitute a health threat.
My wife was deaf, my grandmother hard-of-hearing. When, as part of their federally mandated safety plan, I&M wrote to us about their siren procedures for melt-down or other "accidents", we asked what provisions could be made for those who wouldn't hear such things. There was, of course, no response. The letter of the law had been fulfilled.
The Donald C. Cook facility (named after a chairman of the board) was scheduled to have gone off line after twenty years. This was at the end of the Reagan administration. Fortunately, since this plant, according to US New & World Report, had yet to make money and there was still nowhere to send its wastes, the original rules were rescinded. It still runs, occasionally, today, forty years after its construction, a humming, steaming eyesore. The Great Lakes are dotted with these dangerous monsters.
I quite liked the Prometheus Project.
The plant was finished in the early seventies, right up alongside the beach. The process of construction had involved building a huge artificial harbor projecting into the water which collected the sands which would normally have drifted southward along its north end. Consequently, everyone for a couple of miles to the south lost beach and dunes, many their water pumps. The residents so affected began a collective lawsuit against the I&M which dragged on expensively for almost a decade until being settled out of court, our pockets being empty. It was ugly. My college and first graduate school years had me reading hundreds of pages of depositions and scientific studies every time I came home from school.
Because of the lack of any safe depository for nuclear waste, the spent fuel rods are kept in cement housings in small ponds surrounded by chain link fences in the woods, ponds that anyone can simply walk to in a few minutes from the county road serving as the southern boundary of I&M land. Because the plant wasn't set back, years of high lake levels led to the waves striking its very base, forcing the company to pile up rip-rap and pour cement in front of the doubled retaining walls. Because the retaining walls retain, the whole forest behind the plant and to both sides of it flooded. We lost our own road to this. Now, with 9-ll, the whole area, hundreds of acres, has been surrounded by large, easily moveable white boulders to prevent motorized intrusion and the low-paid private security guards (the cause of most of the theft at the plant) have been provided with black uniforms, flak jackets and automatic weapons. Meanwhile, the beach too has been blocked off on both ends by large pillars--so much for public access--and warnings that trespassers will be shot. Of course, one can still walk over to the fuel rod ponds or even to the plant itself as the aforementioned guards rarely leave their vehicles and many of them are in such physical shape that a walk up a hill would constitute a health threat.
My wife was deaf, my grandmother hard-of-hearing. When, as part of their federally mandated safety plan, I&M wrote to us about their siren procedures for melt-down or other "accidents", we asked what provisions could be made for those who wouldn't hear such things. There was, of course, no response. The letter of the law had been fulfilled.
The Donald C. Cook facility (named after a chairman of the board) was scheduled to have gone off line after twenty years. This was at the end of the Reagan administration. Fortunately, since this plant, according to US New & World Report, had yet to make money and there was still nowhere to send its wastes, the original rules were rescinded. It still runs, occasionally, today, forty years after its construction, a humming, steaming eyesore. The Great Lakes are dotted with these dangerous monsters.
I quite liked the Prometheus Project.
February 12, 2010
A great and terrible book, never really outdated even though it was written thirty years ago. I slogged through the first part of it a bit but then raced through the rest, even though I had a pretty good idea of what was going to happen to everyone.
If you read it and you feel like you've been left hanging at the end (it ends ominously but you can pretty much figure out what they are implying) and would like to know more, I recommend reading "Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster" by Svetlana Alexievich. That pretty much says it all.
If you read it and you feel like you've been left hanging at the end (it ends ominously but you can pretty much figure out what they are implying) and would like to know more, I recommend reading "Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster" by Svetlana Alexievich. That pretty much says it all.
January 17, 2016
This book makes a wonderful read partly because it puts right in your face the possibility of a nuclear disaster by human negligence. You get to take a preview of how life can drastically change with an incident like this and how man has yet to learn and is not the master of elements. It is a well crafted story and makes an interesting read.
January 8, 2017
This book provided me good information and research for my thriller novel, 'The Sandman.'
Project Prometheus is a multi-billion-dollar nuclear facility, and the world's largest. It's a prime example of nuclear age technology. But when human error creates a nuclear meltdown, the unthinkable nuclear holocaust begins.
This thought-provoking novel takes readers on a suspense-filled, dramatic story with characters facing a believable disaster scenario. It goes through stages of what happens to the communities when such a disaster takes place, and the necessary steps we must take facing such dangers. The reader also asks many questions during the novel.
Does sabotage take place?
Is there future for the human race after such a disaster?
These are questions you will find when you read this thought-provoking novel.
Project Prometheus is a multi-billion-dollar nuclear facility, and the world's largest. It's a prime example of nuclear age technology. But when human error creates a nuclear meltdown, the unthinkable nuclear holocaust begins.
This thought-provoking novel takes readers on a suspense-filled, dramatic story with characters facing a believable disaster scenario. It goes through stages of what happens to the communities when such a disaster takes place, and the necessary steps we must take facing such dangers. The reader also asks many questions during the novel.
Does sabotage take place?
Is there future for the human race after such a disaster?
These are questions you will find when you read this thought-provoking novel.
March 8, 2016
I read this book many years ago. I still remember it. It is a chilling read. I am happy to see it is still available for a new generation of readers to freak out over. A must read for those who care about the planet and care about the incompetence and greed in making decisions that affect us all. Get a drink ready... You will need one
November 23, 2024
Found in a free little library and the cover looked interesting.
This went from a steady four to a three to about a 2.5.
It’s a work of fiction, written ten years before Chernobyl. Based on what we know from Chernobyl, some of the information is inaccurate. A total meltdown would not have happened in a matter of minutes. An airplane flying into the fallout would have shorted out and crashed into the sea.
The toxic love triangle between the plant manager, his controlling co worker and a bland nurse character did not help the story much either. Neither did the loads of r/menwritingwomen
Just go watch (or rewatch) Chernobyl. Or check out the three part documentary on Three Mile Island on Netflix.
This went from a steady four to a three to about a 2.5.
It’s a work of fiction, written ten years before Chernobyl. Based on what we know from Chernobyl, some of the information is inaccurate. A total meltdown would not have happened in a matter of minutes. An airplane flying into the fallout would have shorted out and crashed into the sea.
The toxic love triangle between the plant manager, his controlling co worker and a bland nurse character did not help the story much either. Neither did the loads of r/menwritingwomen
Just go watch (or rewatch) Chernobyl. Or check out the three part documentary on Three Mile Island on Netflix.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
June 21, 2019
A book I always wanted to track down and read, due to it being the template for an aborted John Carpenter movie in the early 1980s! I'm always up for a good nuclear meltdown adventure, but this short novel (novella?) didn't really crackle for me - as with many of these disaster books essentially designed to court movie producers, the main scenario takes a back seat to some trivial human interest drivel, which might make a good TV movie but does not make for a gripping novel. And the disaster was caused by a (yawn) terrorist, when in reality these power plants can handily blow up all by themselves. That said, has there ever been a really good atomic disaster book?
June 11, 2018
Popis jaderné havárie v elektrárně. Jak souhra nekvalitní práce a spěchání na termín způsobí katastrofu. Několik bočních dějových linií - zatrpklý zaměstnanec pašuje palivo z elektrárny, vyšetřování vraždy a milostný trojúhelník mezi vedoucími elektrárny a zdravotní sestrou.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
March 26, 2020
Docela mi trvalo se zacist. Mela jsem ze zacatku velky zmatek v postavach, alr postupne se pribeh rozbehl a kolem poloviny knihy uz me zacal bavit vic. Skoda ze je uz nazvem knihy vyspoilerovano co se stane...
November 24, 2019
Přiběh dobrý, ale zasloužilo by to znova projít, vyházet některé slepé větve... pak by to byla i knížka skvělá.
September 16, 2023
I read this book nearly 6 months ago and I still feel rather queasy.
The story is about a worst case scenario in an atomic power plant. Everyone dies, even the good guys.
The story is about a worst case scenario in an atomic power plant. Everyone dies, even the good guys.
December 28, 2024
I read this on the Internet Archive as a scanned copy of an old, yellowed paperback edition. This is my first dip back into using the Internet Archive following their security breach and crash a few weeks ago. This book is by the same authors who wrote "The Glass Inferno", which was filmed as the 1970's Irwin Allen disaster movie "The Towering Inferno." I guess these guys specialized in disaster books. I was interested in reading the book after I recently discovered that John Carpenter once worked on a movie version that ultimately wasn't filmed. The book is about a nuclear power plant disaster, and the book itself is something of a disaster. It was published in the late 1970's and is very much a product of its time - there are manly men, casual sex, and continuous day drinking and heavy smoking. A malfunction at a giant California nuclear power plant leads to the meltdown of four reactor cores grouped in a single containment building. Much disastering ensues with fallout billowing over southern California. The book reads like a screenplay for a 70's disaster movie. The action, dialogue and everything else is overblown and cartoonish. There are evil power company execs, focused solely on profit at the expense of safety. There is a cringy 3-way romance where two alpha male engineers vie for the affections of a "liberated" woman. When the disaster is initiated it rapidly spreads through the plant due to a series of questionable cost-cutting design decisions that would never be incorporated into an actual power plant. The entire book is basically a 400+ page polemic about the nuclear power industry. Three out of five stars.
June 30, 2015
The idea for this book came to the authors as they wrote The Glass Inferno, which was an awesome book and one I enjoyed reading very much. So I figured...OK, this one was written afterward, it has to be better, right?
I like the way that the authors take potential real-life disasters and make them into a story that is both entertaining and instructive (often chillingly so). It worked perfectly in The Glass Inferno. But The Prometheus Crisis just wasn't as strong of a story. Oh, they'd done their homework; it was full of believable facts and interesting information, to be sure. But the pacing was off.
They even mentioned that in the foreword, about how they dragged it out a bit, because in real life it would be over much more quickly and there wouldn't be time for the dramatic effect needed in a work of fiction. But even with their attempts to drag it out, it just felt...stretched too think in some places, and too condensed in others. I hate to have to keep comparing it to The Glass Inferno, but for better or worse, that's all that keeps coming to my mind. Plot and pacing are there, in a story about a slowly burning high-rise. But the story of a nuclear power plant meltdown...it's like, everything happens pretty much at once, and before and after, there isn't a lot going on.
Thomas Scortia and Frank Robinson are good with characters - they're good at writing believable, flawed yet sympathetic characters, of all shapes and sizes. The only problem was that most of them weren't given enough "screen time" to have any coherent character arc. Greg Parks came closest, but even his felt unfulfilled. And everyone else's - Karen and Lerner were the next two as far as fleshed-out characters, and beyond them...just bits and pieces. Like Klamath, the police inspector? A few disjointed scenes here or there that added up to nothing. A lot of time spent on getting in the heads of characters who only graced one or two pages of the entire book. The interspersed conversations with the congressional committee were annoying and confusing most of the time - having several random senators and representatives asking questions, when you can't keep any of the people straight, detracts from the story. And the ending, while sobering and I suppose realistic, lacked any real dénouement or closure to most of the characters.
This was an OK read...and the part about the dangers of corporate/governmental ignorance and greed stand the test of time extremely well...but it could have been a lot better.
I like the way that the authors take potential real-life disasters and make them into a story that is both entertaining and instructive (often chillingly so). It worked perfectly in The Glass Inferno. But The Prometheus Crisis just wasn't as strong of a story. Oh, they'd done their homework; it was full of believable facts and interesting information, to be sure. But the pacing was off.
They even mentioned that in the foreword, about how they dragged it out a bit, because in real life it would be over much more quickly and there wouldn't be time for the dramatic effect needed in a work of fiction. But even with their attempts to drag it out, it just felt...stretched too think in some places, and too condensed in others. I hate to have to keep comparing it to The Glass Inferno, but for better or worse, that's all that keeps coming to my mind. Plot and pacing are there, in a story about a slowly burning high-rise. But the story of a nuclear power plant meltdown...it's like, everything happens pretty much at once, and before and after, there isn't a lot going on.
Thomas Scortia and Frank Robinson are good with characters - they're good at writing believable, flawed yet sympathetic characters, of all shapes and sizes. The only problem was that most of them weren't given enough "screen time" to have any coherent character arc. Greg Parks came closest, but even his felt unfulfilled. And everyone else's - Karen and Lerner were the next two as far as fleshed-out characters, and beyond them...just bits and pieces. Like Klamath, the police inspector? A few disjointed scenes here or there that added up to nothing. A lot of time spent on getting in the heads of characters who only graced one or two pages of the entire book. The interspersed conversations with the congressional committee were annoying and confusing most of the time - having several random senators and representatives asking questions, when you can't keep any of the people straight, detracts from the story. And the ending, while sobering and I suppose realistic, lacked any real dénouement or closure to most of the characters.
This was an OK read...and the part about the dangers of corporate/governmental ignorance and greed stand the test of time extremely well...but it could have been a lot better.
July 23, 2017
Lidé budou muset žít s jadernou energií. Bylo by lepší, kdyby z ní neměli celý život hrůzu.
Když jsme přijali pohodlí automobilu, přijali jsme taky těch padesát tisíc mrtvých na silnici ročně. Je to neštěstí, když někdo přijde takhle o život, ale nikdo už o tom nepřemýšlí. Musíme žít s jadernou energií a to znamená, že riskujeme občasnou katastrofu. S tímhle se nebudeme chtít smířit, ale nakonec to taky uděláme.
Prométheus je obrovská jaderná elektrárna. Elektrárna, se kterou to nedopadne dobře. To víme od začátku, protože děj je prokládán útržky z pozdějších výslechů při vyšetřování (a taky tak trochu podle názvu, žejo).
Není to postapokalyptický román, ale spíš předapokalyptický a přiapokalyptický - sledujeme dění několika dní před katastrofou, katastrofu samotnou a ještě asi den po ní.
Nevím, jestli mé nadšení dosahuje celých pěti hvězdiček, ale protože je dnes první den mých nedlouhých prázdnin, dovolím si být nadšená klidně přehnaně.
Prosím, víc takových knížek na poličce volně k rozebrání!
Když jsme přijali pohodlí automobilu, přijali jsme taky těch padesát tisíc mrtvých na silnici ročně. Je to neštěstí, když někdo přijde takhle o život, ale nikdo už o tom nepřemýšlí. Musíme žít s jadernou energií a to znamená, že riskujeme občasnou katastrofu. S tímhle se nebudeme chtít smířit, ale nakonec to taky uděláme.
Prométheus je obrovská jaderná elektrárna. Elektrárna, se kterou to nedopadne dobře. To víme od začátku, protože děj je prokládán útržky z pozdějších výslechů při vyšetřování (a taky tak trochu podle názvu, žejo).
Není to postapokalyptický román, ale spíš předapokalyptický a přiapokalyptický - sledujeme dění několika dní před katastrofou, katastrofu samotnou a ještě asi den po ní.
Nevím, jestli mé nadšení dosahuje celých pěti hvězdiček, ale protože je dnes první den mých nedlouhých prázdnin, dovolím si být nadšená klidně přehnaně.
Prosím, víc takových knížek na poličce volně k rozebrání!
August 14, 2017
I decided to re-read this when I saw it on Kindle Unlimited. I'm not exactly the nucleophobe who would have appreciated the message more, nor did it contain the nitty-gritty details that I remembered it having, but on the whole, it still holds up reasonably well as an entertaining disaster novel.
(Cautionary note: If you get the Kindle version, be aware that it is absolutely chock-full of OCR errors. You can still read the text, but if you're at all sensitive to that sort of thing, it'll keep jerking you out of the reading flow.)
(Cautionary note: If you get the Kindle version, be aware that it is absolutely chock-full of OCR errors. You can still read the text, but if you're at all sensitive to that sort of thing, it'll keep jerking you out of the reading flow.)
April 17, 2015
Has a handful of good stretches, and some nice exploration of actual procedures following a plant meltdown, but for the most part, it's a bland clunker. Characters aren't that interesting, most of the thrills fall flat, overly dull and drawn out, romantic triangle is an eye-roller, some really awkward chunks of prose.
July 20, 2024
I really enjoyed this book, a very real and plausible hypothetical that turned into a horrific story of the dangers of nuclear fallout, I picked this up on a whim and really ended up enjoying it
Displaying 1 - 20 of 20 reviews