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This chapter discusses methods to determine dissolved and sediment-sorbed radionuclides in rivers, estuaries, coastal waters, oceans, and lakes under accidental and routine radionuclide releases. It provides simple but robust analytical solution models to determine site-specific radionuclide concentrations with minimum site-specific data. It has step-by-step instructions with all required information supplied by accompanying tables and figures. The chapter contains many sample calculations. It also discusses a theory of radionuclide transport and fate mechanisms in surface water. The Chernobyl nuclear accident is used to illustrate important mechanisms, radionuclide migration and accumulation, transport and fate modeling, aquatic impacts, and human health effects through aquatic pathways. Thus, this chapter connects the theory to its applications and to the actual Chernobyl nuclear accident assessment.

This chapter, building on Chs. 4 and 5, focuses on two German novels about the nuclear accident at Chernobyl, Christa Wolf’s Accident: A Day’s News and Gabriele Wohmann’s Sound of the Flute. Both texts portray this transnational risk scenario in its impact on the local, ordinary lives of protagonists in East Germany and West Germany, respectively. Wolf emphasizes the way in which transnational technological risk of the kind instantiated by Chernobyl transcends disrupts and alters the experience of the local, which cannot offer adequate linguistic and cultural resources to imagine and describe this kind of hazard. Modernist literary innovations, in Wolf’s approach, become a way of bridging this gap. Wohmann, by contrast, emphasizes how even the most dangerous and large-scale risk scenarios are gradually integrated into the texture of everyday language and experience, challenging established modes of inhabitation but also giving rise to new ones. The chapter concludes with a brief summary of how Chernobyl itself has been normalized by becoming a popular tourist destination.

This chapter offers quantitative analysis of factors associated with nuclear power development from 1950 to 2001. It shows that high levels of economic development and energy insecurity have historically correlated with reliance on nuclear power. On the other hand, the findings do not support the popular argument that countries pursue peaceful nuclear programs when they have an interest in building nuclear weapons (i.e., nuclear hedging). The analysis has important implications for the future of the nuclear renaissance. It suggests, for instance, that stagnation or decline in developed countries such as France, South Korea, and the United States could prevent the realization of a true renaissance.

Nuclear energy has peaceful applications and non-peaceful applications. The centrepiece of all political efforts to curb the spread of nuclear weapons lies in attempting to harmonise the proliferation of nuclear reactors with the non-proliferation of nuclear weapons. What all nuclear reactors have in common is nuclear fuel, which must contain at least some uranium in the form of the isotope uranium-235 (or very much more rarely 233), or plutonium, or both. This is usually described as ‘fissile material’. This chapter is about nuclear technology and the technical interconnections between commercial and military nuclear programmes. It also discusses the spread of nuclear technology and the use to which it has been put by a number of states, both inside and outside the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty, to bring them close to or even take them over the nuclear weapons threshold. Moreover, the chapter provides an overview on critical mass and nuclear bombs, the differences between the United States and its natural allies over nuclear proliferation, radioactive waste and nuclear accidents and uranium enrichment.

This chapter presents Japanese Prime Minister Naoto Kan's recollections about the actions he took before his resignation. In particular, he explains the circumstances behind his gradual move away from the use of nuclear power. He says that his experience of the nuclear accident that began to unfold on March 11, 2011, made him realize that a nuclear accident carried with it a risk so large that it could lead to the collapse of a country. He became convinced that what they had been calling “safe nuclear power” could only be found through independence from nuclear power. He also describes the passage of a bill to promote renewable energy and the shutdown of the Hamaoka Nuclear Power Plant.

The chapter investigates a third, and perhaps the most prominent, alternative to hypothesis-testing: inference to the best explanation. The chapter shows why this method is superior to those outlined earlier in the book. Its success is a result of its mandating assessment of causes via potential underlying mechanisms, unification of theoretical principles, and counterfactual manipulation of competing hypotheses. To defend inference to the best explanation, the chapter focuses on the Three Mile Island nuclear accident and shows that, contrary to popular beliefs, it killed many people.

This chapter considers media coverage of the 1979 Three Mile Island nuclear accident. Television reports imparted a sense of urgency that emphasized the potential explosiveness of the situation. News broadcasts made spectators feel like witnesses to a crisis that could, at any moment, turn into a deadly catastrophe. After the crisis ended, photographs of Three Mile Island’s cooling towers became icons of the accident, visual reminders of the tense moments that gripped the nation. Popular imagery mobilized public fear and helped validate the emotional politics of the antireactor movement. Yet these images also detached the accident from broader manifestations of energy crisis and focused public attention on the nuclear power plant as the sole locus of environmental danger. This chapter contrasts the extensive coverage of Three Mile Island with the media’s neglect of the massive radioactive spill in the Rio Puerco, on lands held by the Navajo Nation. The short-term, immediate danger of the China syndrome and Three Mile Island became increasingly visible in American public culture, but the more extensive timeframes of risk remained marginal to spectacle-driven framings of environmental crises.

Drawing on Mackenzie & Spinardi’s research into the potential un-invention of nuclear weapons through the loss of tacit knowledge, this chapter explores a range of artistic responses to the 2011 Fukushima Dai-ichi Nuclear Power Plant disaster. Mackenzie & Spinardi’s work on nuclear weapons design, testing and computing, allows us to think about a new mode of nuclear aesthetics, providing conceptual frameworks relevant to contemporary art practice and discourse such as: the contested nature of sameness in the repetition of objects; the importance of the slowness of tacit knowledge; of the human eye, making and learning with others; the limits of code; and the erosion of nuclear belief systems. Recent artistic practices in Japan and internationally, explore counterfactual possibilities across time; where aspects of nuclear culture are made visible or possible in a world where apocalyptic scenarios are streamed live. The responsibility for nuclear materials is shifting from state weapons production to the privatized nuclear energy industry, and into the public realm of nuclear accidents and public consultation on long-term waste disposal. Artists are concerned with how the networks are interrupted, looped, mapped, slowed down for reflection on how things are made, how stories are told, and how knowledge is consolidated.

Nuclear power was widely regarded as the Holy Grail for energy supply when first introduced into the US electricity market in the late 1950s and early 1960s— power so cheap that utilities could scarcely afford the cost of the meters needed to monitor its consumption and charge for its use. The first civilian reactor, with a capacity to produce 60 MW of electricity (MWe), went into service in Shippingport, Pennsylvania, in late 1957. By the end of 1974, 55 reactors were in operation in the United States with a combined capacity of about 32 GWe. The largest individual power plant had a capacity of 1.25 GWe: the capacity of reactors constructed since 1970 averaged more than 1 GWe. The industry then went into a state of suspended animation. A series of highly publi¬cized accidents was responsible for this precipitous change in the fortunes of the industry. Only 13 reactors were ordered in the United States after 1975, and all of these orders were subsequently cancelled. Public support for nuclear power effectively disappeared in the United States following events that unfolded at the Three Mile Island plant in Pennsylvania on March 28, 1979. It suffered a further setback, not only in the United States but also worldwide, in the wake of the disaster that struck at the Chernobyl nuclear facility in the Ukraine on April 26, 1986. The most recent confidence- sapping development occurred in Japan, at the Fukushima- Daiichi nuclear complex. Floodwaters raised by a tsunami triggered by a major offshore earthquake resulted in a series of self- reinforcing problems in March 2011, culminating in a highly publicized release of radioactivity to the environment that forced the evacuation of more than 300,000 people from the surrounding communities If not a death blow, this most recent accident certainly clouded prospects for the future of nuclear power, not only in Japan but also in many other parts of the world. Notably, Germany elected to close down its nuclear facilities, leading to increased dependence on coal to meet its demand for electricity, seriously complicating its objective to markedly reduce the nation’s overall emissions of CO2.

From 2004-2009, members of the University of Tokyo’s Institute of Social Science undertook a five-year study entitled Kibōgaku (Hope-ology, translated formally as The Social Sciences of Hope). Looking to rebuild hope in Japan after the pop of the economic Bubble, the scholars crafted a survey of Kamaishi, a declining steel town on Japan’s northeastern coast, showing how networks in and out of the city were central to its limited but measurable successes in inspiring local hope for a better future. In the aftermath of the 2011 tsunami that devastated the town, killing a thousand residents, the scholars confronted questions of what hope means and what the connections between rural and urban Japan might mean.

Today’s energy sectors hold different potentials for saving on energy, carbon, and other greenhouse gases (GHGs). Buildings, for instance, represent more than 40% of energy use worldwide and one-third of GHGs (United Nations Environment Programme [UNEP], n.d.a). Improvements in heating, cooling, and powering of buildings, as well as industrial processes, can deliver substantial and cost-effective savings. In line with this, geothermal energy represents a more unusual form of renewable energy in that it can directly contribute to heating, cooling, and electricity services. Unlike a number of its counterparts, geothermal energy can provide a more stable and renewable form of energy that is largely unaffected by weather. The chapter focuses on geothermal energy adoption in Iceland, “a little country that roars,” according to UNFCCC Executive Secretary Christina Figueres (Iceland Monitor, 2014), when discussing leadership in renewable energy use and related action. In developing its renewable energy leadership, Iceland has wrestled, like many countries, with tradeoffs in energy, the environment, and economic development. The chapter highlights the interplay of these interests and explores the innovative engineering and industrial spillovers in Iceland’s geothermal adoption. Iceland is a country of roughly 333,000 people, and is a global leader in renewable energy use (Islandsbanki, 2010; Ministry of the Environment, 2010; Statistics Iceland, 2017). Two-thirds of the country’s primary energy consists of geothermal energy, with roughly nine out of ten Icelandic homes heated by the fuel source and a quarter of the country’s electricity powered by it (Orkustofnun, 2015; Ragnarsson, 2015). The nation leads globally in terms of geothermal heat capacity per capita and serves as a principal source of international training and consulting on geothermal energy, with a diverse industrial cluster that has developed around the technology (Gekon, n.d.; United Nations University Geothermal Training Programme [UN- GTP], n.d). The country’s low carbon development pathway reflects choices and debate about how to manage its natural resources and allow for foreign investment. Iceland began the 20th century as one of the poorest nations in Europe and is now a top-ranked country in the United Nations Development Program’s Human Development Index (Hannibalsson, 2008; United Nations Development Program [UNDP], 2015).

Fossil fuels powered the Industrial Revolution and they continue to dominate our lives as we enter the twenty-first century. Yet there are clear signs that the grip they have on every sector of society must soon relax in favor of other energy sources. Such a transition will not come because we are running out of fossil fuels, but rather because the environmental and social costs of their rapid use threaten our very existence on the planet. This is an expected development. From the time when fossil fuels first enabled and magnified humans’ dominion over the earth, the costs they brought—as any good economist would argue—have been inseparable from their benefits. Although the benefits were explicit and the local costs were experienced by many, it was not until skilled writers such as Zola, Orwell, Llewellyn, and Dickens vividly portrayed them that their widespread and pernicious nature was broadcast to those outside their immediate reach. Nowadays the problems we are grappling with have spread to the global scale, including atmospheric warming, thinning ozone, and rising exposure to above-background radioactivity. Understanding earth–energy associations is a task well matched to the varied skills of geographers. The worth of such study is increasingly apparent as the world’s human population continues to rise, as fossil fuels become more difficult to wrest from the earth, and as we continue to realize that there will be no risk-free, cost-free, or impact-free rabbits coming out of the alternative energy hat. In this chapter, we review developments in energy geography in the US and Canada as posted to the literature since the first edition of Geography in America, including a sprinkling from overseas to provide context. Owing to the fundamental nature of energy, we have accordingly cast a wide net in our background research, albeit with some boundaries. For example, while we discuss several important contributions to energy research by physical and environmental geographers, we excluded consideration of such themes as energy budgets, most climate change research, and mine-land reclamation and radioactive waste transport studies by hydrologists and geomorphologists.