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Chain Reactions - Lucy Jane Santos ***

I very much enjoyed Lucy Jane Santos' previous title Half Lives, which covered 'the unlikely history of radium'. Her enthusiasm for the topic shone through (in true radium fashion). As well as the straight history of the discovery and deployment of radium, we got lots on its use in commercial products - initially in quack medicine, but later in every type of product imaginable, with Boots even selling radiated soda syphon cartridges. In this follow-up Santos takes on what might seem a quite similar topic: the history of our discovery and use of uranium.

There is obviously a degree of overlap between the topics, particularly in the quack medicine usage - particularly delightful were some of the more wacky US attempts to monetise atomic appeal by, for instance, setting up treatment barns where you could be immersed in allegedly (though often not actually) radioactive soil in a process that felt more like going to Lourdes than a true medical treatment. But in practice both because of nuclear weapons and nuclear energy, this is a much more weighty topic than radium. In a sense this is a pity, because it gives less opportunity for Santos to really get us into the more human aspects of what's involved.

Where the book came alive was in a part I thought I knew pretty well already and was expecting to be the least interesting bit - the development of the uranium and plutonium bombs in the Second World War. along with the bomb tests shortly after the war (infamously including Bikini) before the move to thermonuclear weapons. Although a fair amount was familiar, Santos makes this very approachable and gives details that I hadn't come across before, making the whole feel very engaging.

What was slightly less interesting was the lead up from the discovery of uranium to the initial work on chain reactions, and then the development of nuclear power stations, where we go from initial enthusiasm through to the concerns raised by Three Mile Island, Chernobyl and Fukushima and the bizarre decision of countries like Germany to abandon this green energy source. It's not that Santos doesn't cover this in effective detail, making it clear how much safer nuclear is than, say, coal and emphasising the very limited real impact from these accidents. But it was harder to keep enthused about reading these sections. In both the first part of the book and this last quarter or so, there was perhaps too much historical fact and not enough storytelling.

The book is genuinely interesting throughout, and I am glad I read it but it wasn't quite up to Half Lives.

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Review by Brian Clegg - See all Brian's online articles or subscribe to a weekly email free here
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