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New From JHU Press: Atoms for Peace: A Future After 50 Years

By Eric McErlain
From the precis by Johns Hopkins University Press:
The twenty-five contributors to Atoms for Peace grapple in many ways with nuclear proliferation, nuclear terrorism, and the future of nuclear energy. They include officials and scientists from a wide range of agencies and institutions. Among them are officials or former officials from Israel, Egypt, Pakistan, Canada, Korea, and Japan, from the U.S. departments of state, energy, and defense, the U.S. Senate, the National Security Council, the U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, the International Atomic Energy Agency, the United Nations, the Nuclear Threat Initiative, MIT, Los Alamos National Laboratory, the College of William and Mary, and the University of California.

Atoms for Peace also includes a set of fundamental speeches and documents relating to Atoms for Peace and its institutions.
Back in September 2005, our CEO, Skip Bowman, shared his own thoughts about "Atoms for Peace" in a speech he delivered at the World Nuclear Association Annual Symposium:
What if Mr. Eisenhower came back today and reviewed our progress?

There is a rule of thumb for advanced technologies that it takes about 30 years from proof-of-concept to full-scale commercial deployment. By that measure, I think we could tell Mr. Eisenhower that we’ve done rather well.

In the United States, within two years of his Atoms for Peace speech, we deployed our first nuclear-powered submarine. Within four years we reached full-power operation at our Shippingport reactor in Pennsylvania—really the first commercial-scale power reactor. Since then, we’ve built 434 power reactors around the world, which produce approximately 17 percent of the world’s electricity.

Not bad, Mr. Eisenhower.

But you know what he’d say? He’d say: “Nice start, but you’re not keeping pace with the challenge.”
Read the rest right now.

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Comments

Anonymous said…
Let's not forget the advances in medical science that have come from the use of radionuclides in diagnostic and therapeutic procedures. Production of medical radionuclides in non-power reactors have saved millions of lives around the world, one of them being my mother, who was cured of cancer through the use of teletherapy sources. It gave her another 30 years of life, which, to me and my family, was a gift beyond price.
January 4, 2007 at 9:29 AM
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