The Atomic West - read free eBook in online reader or directly download on the web page. Select files or add your book in reader. Download and read online ebook The Atomic West write by Bruce W. Hevly. This book was released on 2011-12-01. The Atomic West available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. The Manhattan Project—the World War II race to produce an atomic bomb—transformed the entire country in myriad ways, but it did not affect each region equally. Acting on an enduring perception of the American West as an “empty” place, the U.S. government located a disproportionate number of nuclear facilities—particularly the ones most likely to spread pollution—in western states. The Manhattan Project manufactured plutonium at Hanford, Washington; designed and assembled bombs at Los Alamos, New Mexico; and detonated the world’s first atomic bomb at Alamagordo, New Mexico, on June 16, 1945. In the years that followed the war, the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission selected additional western sites for its work. Many westerners initially welcomed the atom. Like federal officials, they, too, regarded their region as “empty,” or underdeveloped. Facilities to make, test, and base atomic weapons, sites to store nuclear waste, and even nuclear power plants were regarded as assets. By the 1960s and 1970s, however, regional attitudes began to change. At a variety of locales, ranging from Eskimo Alaska to Mormon Utah, westerners devoted themselves to resisting the atom and its effects on their environments and communities. Just as the atomic age had dawned in the American West, so its artificial sun began to set there. The Atomic West brings together contributions from several disciplines to explore the impact on the West of the development of atomic power from wartime secrecy and initial postwar enthusiasm to public doubts and protest in the 1970s and 1980s. An impressive example of the benefits of interdisciplinary studies on complex topics, The Atomic West advances our understanding of both regional history and the history of science, and does so with human communities as a significant focal point. The book will be of special interest to students and experts on the American West, environmental history, and the history of science and technology.
J. Robert Oppenheimer, The Cold War, and The Atomic West
J. Robert Oppenheimer, The Cold War, and The Atomic West - read free eBook in online reader or directly download on the web page. Select files or add your book in reader. Download and read online ebook J. Robert Oppenheimer, The Cold War, and The Atomic West write by Jon Hunner. This book was released on 2012-11-12. J. Robert Oppenheimer, The Cold War, and The Atomic West available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. In 1922, the teenage son of a Jewish immigrant ventured from Manhattan to New Mexico for his health. It was the first of many trips to the Sangre de Cristo Mountains, a western retreat where J. Robert Oppenheimer would eventually hold pathbreaking discussions with world-renowned scientists about atomic physics. Oppenheimer came to feel at home in the American West, and while extensive studies have been made of the man, this is the first book to explicitly link him with the region. J. Robert Oppenheimer, the Cold War, and the Atomic West explores how the West influenced Oppenheimer as a scientist and as a person—and the role he played in influencing it. Jon Hunner’s concise account of Oppenheimer’s life and the emergence of an Atomic West distills a vast literature for students and general readers. In this brisk, engaging biography, the author recounts how Oppenheimer helped locate the atomic weapons research lab at Los Alamos, New Mexico, and helped establish leading physics departments at the University of California–Berkeley and Caltech. By taking part in moving atomic physics west of the Mississippi, Oppenheimer bolstered the establishment of research labs, uranium mines, nuclear reactors, and more, bringing talented people—and billions of dollars in federal contracts—to the region. Interwoven into this atomic tale are insights into the physicist’s troubled growing-up years, his marriage and family life, the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and Oppenheimer’s eventual downfall. After the first atomic bomb burst over the New Mexican desert in 1945 and as the Cold War developed, the American myth of the Wild West expanded to encompass atomic sheriffs saving the world for democracy—even as powerful opponents began questioning Oppenheimer’s place in that story. Against the backdrop of the physicist’s life twining with the region’s history, Hunner explores the promise and peril of the Atomic Age.
Atomic Frontier Days
Atomic Frontier Days - read free eBook in online reader or directly download on the web page. Select files or add your book in reader. Download and read online ebook Atomic Frontier Days write by John M. Findlay. This book was released on 2011-10-01. Atomic Frontier Days available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Outstanding Title by Choice Magazine On the banks of the Pacific Northwest’s greatest river lies the Hanford nuclear reservation, an industrial site that appears to be at odds with the surrounding vineyards and desert. The 586-square-mile compound on the Columbia River is known both for its origins as part of the Manhattan Project, which made the first atomic bombs, and for the monumental effort now under way to clean up forty-five years of waste from manufacturing plutonium for nuclear weapons. Hanford routinely makes the news, as scientists, litigants, administrators, and politicians argue over its past and its future. It is easy to think about Hanford as an expression of federal power, a place apart from humanity and nature, but that view distorts its history. Atomic Frontier Days looks through a wider lens, telling a complex story of production, community building, politics, and environmental sensibilities. In brilliantly structured parallel stories, the authors bridge the divisions that accompany Hanford’s headlines and offer perspective on today’s controversies. Influenced as much by regional culture, economics, and politics as by war, diplomacy, and environmentalism, Hanford and the Tri-Cities of Richland, Pasco, and Kennewick illuminate the history of the modern American West.
Making a Real Killing
Making a Real Killing - read free eBook in online reader or directly download on the web page. Select files or add your book in reader. Download and read online ebook Making a Real Killing write by Len Ackland. This book was released on 2002. Making a Real Killing available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. A chilling, fast-moving study of the nuclear weapons plant in the Denver suburbs, told through the experiences of managers, workers, activists, and neighbors who were all so deeply affected by the hazardous plant.
Warm Sands
Warm Sands - read free eBook in online reader or directly download on the web page. Select files or add your book in reader. Download and read online ebook Warm Sands write by Eric William Mogren. This book was released on 2002. Warm Sands available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. From 1978 to 1998, Uranium Mill Tailings Remedial Action (UMTRA) Project contractors removed and secured nearly forty million cubic yards of low-level radioactive uranium reduction mill tailings waste from abandoned mill sites in eleven states and four Indian reservations, enough material to bury 2300 football fields in ten feet of radioactive sand. The contractors also decontaminated over five thousand residential, commercial, and public properties that had been polluted with tailings. In addition to these federal efforts, the private uranium industry interred millions of tons of tailings generated by their mill operations. The UMTRA Project was the world??'s largest materials management program designed to shield the public from potentially hazardous radioactive materials. This is the story of that project, contextualized within the history of American atomic power and uranium mining. "Warm Sands" explores the structural factors that drove the formation of tailings policy, focusing on certain variables such as the legal centralization of authority over atomic energy in the federal government, the autonomy of the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) and Congress??'s Joint Committee on Atomic Energy (JCAE), public health concerns, and traditional American democracy???vital to understanding the evolution of milling policy. Mogren discovered that non-elected governmental technocrats, scientists, lawyers, and administrators played a more influential role than did politicians or the public in the policy-making process. Furthermore, governmental organizations and semi-autonomous atomic bureaucrats did not function in predictable ways in the formation of mill tailings policy.
