Power to Save the World, by Gwyneth Cravens - Jan 15, 2008 

As the half dozen people who have ever read anything on my website are probably aware, I have been interested in Uranium lately, but I’ve been reluctant to buy in because of the tremendous amount of hype that has been associated with it. Rather than just listen to the talking heads, I picked up a couple of books on nuclear power. Because it is tough to find an unbiased opinion of nuclear power, I bought both a pro-nuclear and an anti-nuclear book. The first one I read was ``Power to Save the World``, by Gwyneth Cravens. Ms. Cravens claims to have originally been an anti-nuclear protestor, but like many environmentalists, has come to look at nuclear power as a way of preventing climate change.

The biggest criticism I have of this book has nothing to do with her analysis of nuclear power but rather with the fact that she is primarily a writer of fiction and how clear she makes that fact in her book. I haven’t read any of her novels, but I am sure they are awful. Some her passages are hackneyed and out of place that they are actually comical. Some of my personal favourites from the book include when she tells us that in Albuquerque “the sunsets unfold like a series of long thoughts” and that the “thousands of stars…can inspire contemplation about where we came from, what part we have to play during our brief sojurn, and where we’re going”.

Another problem I have with this book is it is told as a narrative of her various travels throughout the United States touring nuclear facilities, mostly with her friend Rip Anderson, a nuclear power expert and scientist at Sandia National Laboratories. I couldn’t help but get the impression that she was perhaps secretly in love with Rip, or at least wanted the reader to fall in love with him. When we are introduced to Rip we are told that he seems relaxed but is extremely observant, that he likes faded jeans and a Stetson hat, and that he is wiry of build and quick of step.

Despite her tortured prose, this book does provide a great deal of useful information on nuclear power and anyone interested in learning a lot of technical information about nuclear power will not be disappointed. The reader can simply skip over the descriptions of Rip’s clothing and moustache and the philosophical musings.

Ms. Cravens is clear not satisfied with explaining how nuclear power works; she wants to convince us that nuclear power is the best source of energy we have and that much of the anti-nuclear movement is based on fear and ignorance. Some her methods for achieving this are quite effective. One of her more interesting points was that people get exposed to radiation all the time and are not even aware of it. For example, flying on an airplane will expose you to far more radiation than touring a nuclear facility, as will riding the New York subway.

The author’s lobbying for nuclear power runs into trouble when she tries to make the point that even the worst nuclear accidents in history and the scenarios that anti-nuclear activists bring up are actually nowhere near as catastrophic as people are led to believe. She starts off well and makes some interesting points that the fatalities from Chernobyl were much lower than people think and that there were no fatalities from the 3-mile Island meltdown. If she had quit while she was ahead and been satisfied with convincing the reader that will nuclear accidents are bad, they are not as apocalyptic as people often believe. Unfortunately Ms. Cravens becomes overzealous in downplaying these accidents to the point where her objectivity falls into question. She even tries to downplay the severity of the effects on Nagasaki and Hiroshima. Some things are so awful that is pointless to quibble about how awful they are. Whatever the exact death toll and cancer rates, events such as those are horrific events that must be prevented. Her attempts at downplaying those events are pointless and irrelevant to her argument.

Nothing gets under my skin more than blatant, unrepentant hypocrisy and bias. Throughout her book, Ms. Cravens harps on the importance of using probabilistic risk assessment when considering the dangers of nuclear power. Essentially this means not just looking at how bad a particular event would be, but rather the probability that the event will occur. She voices her frustration that critics of nuclear power only focus on the worst case scenario, however, she makes no mention of probabilistic risk assessment when she talks about how global warming could cause the oceans to rise by six feet and kill a billion people. The same goes for the way she states that “coal fired plants cause the deaths of twenty-four thousand Americans per year as well as hundreds of thousands of cases of lung and cardiovascular diseases”, but that we can’t attribute the high rate of cancer near Chernobyl to the meltdown because there are many factors involved.

I don’t know enough about the subject matter to contradict most of what she says, but the one case where I do no better is quite troubling. When discussing some research that was conducted near Chernobyl, we are told that nobody in these hamlets had any identification except name and birth date. Anyone who has spent any time in the former Soviet Union, as I have, knows that this is preposterous. Everybody must carry a passport in these places and anyone can be detained for not having their documents with them. This highlights one of the fundamental limitations of the book; Ms. Cravens is constantly repeating what others tell her and is not an expert in any of the matters she is discussing.

Despite its shortcomings, this book does provide a good technical overview of the nuclear power industry and is worth reading for anyone with an interest in this area. Unfortunately, the author’s background as a fiction write rather than a scientist, combined with her obvious bias, prevents it from meeting its full potential. I rate this book two out of five bananas.

A History of the Global Stock Market

My inaugural book review is of A History of the Global Stock Market by B. Mark Smith. This is a good book for people like me who have a fascination with stock markets. It gives a good overview of the history of markets, providing a variety of interesting stories without getting bogged down in too much detail of any one era or example. The book provides enough detail to allow you to determine if you are interested enough to learn about the various topics in more detail. I found this book to be quite useful for putting current events into a historical context. To steal a line from Mark Twain, history does not always repeat itself, but it rhymes.

The main criticism I have of this book is that although it is ostensibly an overview of the history and development of global stock markets, it becomes apparent early on that the author’s true goal is to present a thesis that stock markets act rationally and to debunk many of the theories of behaviouralists who claim that markets often act irrationally, thereby leading to market bubbles. This would not be such a bad thing if the author approached this debate in an objective way. Unfortunately, it is abundantly clear that while the author seems to acknowledge that markets can be inefficiently priced at times, he had become convinced before writing this book that bubbles as a result of irrational markets do not really occur. The arguments he makes are interesting and valid, such as the notion that investors will knowingly buy an overvalued stock if they believe they can resell it at a higher price, but he fails to acknowledge some famous examples that contradict his argument and glosses over others.

The most blatant example of this is his complete omission of perhaps the most interesting and outrageous bubble in history, the Tulip Mania in Holland in the early part of the 1600s, when people paid extraordinary amounts for tulip bulbs. This omission is even more perplexing given that he references the famous book Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds, which he describes as focusing particularly on the South Sea Bubble of the 1700s. While Charles MacKay does deal with the South Sea Bubble, he also goes into some length about the Tulip Mania. Regardless of his motive, the author has lamentably kept his readers from a fascinating and informative story.

Mr. Smith also breezes through the tech bubble, devoting only a handful of pages to it. Perhaps when he wrote this book, that story was still being beaten to death in the papers and therefore felt it unnecessary to go into it in much detail, but for a reader in 2007 it is a definate shortcoming. In the short section of a chapter spent on the tech bubble, he mentions a case where Palm was worth $54.3 Billion, but 3Com, which owned 95% of Palm, was only worth only $28 Billion, yet the author simply cannot bring himself to acknowledge the complete irrationality of this event. While many of his points on bubbles are valid, and in many cases the people are not acting quite as hysterically as they appear on the surface, examples such as Palm suggest that at least on occasion there are instances of irrationality in the market.

Even though this book was not as good as it could have been, I must confess that I had some trouble putting it down and would recommend it to anyone with an interest in the history and efficiency of stock markets. If this book were a wine I would describe it as quaffable. I give it 3 bananas out of a possible 5.

Ms. Caldicott’s polemic against the nuclear industry has only served to stereotype the anti-nuclear movement as a bunch of fanatical left-wing nuts. This book is an affront to intelligent, open minded people everywhere. I quite literally felt that my intelligence was being insulted as I read this book, and I would strongly caution that anyone who has ever tried and failed to publish a book should avoid reading anything by Ms. Caldicott lest they suffer a massive rage-induced stroke. On the other hand, if like me you have never tried to publish anything, this should give you hope that if she can do it, anyone can do it.

I’m reminded of a little episode that happened way back in high school in calculus class. The teacher had put a problem on the board and went around the class to look at the students’ answers. When he came to my friend, who spent more time passing notes than taking notes, he just stood staring at her answer with a puzzled look. When she asked him if she had done it right he just shook his head said “There is more wrong with that answer than I can express in 50 words or less”, and walked on. I feel like I would need a book of my own to properly critique this book, so I will simply a few examples to give you feel for the type of book this is.
On the cover of this book is a quote from Naomi Klein in which she states that Ms. Caldicott has the rare ability to combine urgency with humor. I did not find any humor in this book, but perhaps that is just me. Perhaps more insightful readers will pick up the subtle humor in the passage where Ms. Caldicott, when discussing the potential effects of a nuclear accident in New York, writes “Consequently, the symptoms that will be experienced by people in Westchester County and Manhattan include: acute loss of hair, severe nausea, vomiting and diarrhea, bleeding from every orifice – hose, mouth, gums, stomach, and bowel – and massive, overwhelming infection.”

The closest that Ms. Caldicott comes to humor, albeit clearly unintentional on her part, is when she says that “the design for an atomic bomb can easily be found on the internet; some basic materials purchased at the local hardware show will complete production.” I find it infuriating that she apparently assumes I will take that as fact and not wonder if there was another body of thought that would suggest it is not so easy to pick up a few things from the hardware store any make a nuclear bomb.

Ms. Caldicott states in her book that every male in the northern hemisphere has a tiny amount of plutonium in his testicles from radioactive fallout that is still falling on the earth from the upper atmosphere, which was polluted by the atmospheric weapons tests…” If she really had a sense of humor, she should have given us a few funny anecdotes from her time spent traveling around North America gathering information on the plutonium content in men’s testicles.
I am someone who actually enjoys a good spirited debate, be it about business, politics, or sports, and one thing I’ve noticed is that when someone resorts to personal attacks and insults it is usually a sign of the weakness of the person’s argument. Consistently throughout her book she portrays her opponents not as fair minded people who have a difference of opinion with her, but as liars or as simpletons who have been manipulated by the nuclear industry and, even worse, the Bush/Cheney administration. In reference to Dr. James Lovelock, a highly regarded scientist and environmentalist who recently came out in favour of nuclear power, Ms. Caldicott but does not mention any of his reasons but instead simply states that he now “wrongly advocates the use of nuclear power as one solution to the global warming crisis.”

I could go on and on with more examples of absurd bias childishness, but there is no need to beat that dead horse. If you have made up your mind that the nuclear industry and all who support it our evil and just want to see someone rant about it, by all means buy this book. If you are someone who wants to weigh the pros and cons of nuclear power, you should look elsewhere. I rate this book 0 out of 5 bananas.