Friday, March 27, 2009

Coast to Coast!

Put on a fresh pot of coffee...Saturday night, 3/28/09 from 2:00AM to 5:00AM (eastern), I will be LIVE with Ian Punnett on Coast to Coast AM. This will be my second interview with Ian - he also had me on for my last history book, The Great Starvation Experiment, and I am really looking forward to this. Ian is an insightful interviewer - the kind that actually reads the book before having the author on his show. And the audience is huge, smart, and devoted. Here's a link to the C2C website:

http://www.coasttocoastam.com/

If you're not a night owl, you can download the podcast there.

Saturday, March 21, 2009

Editorial in the Washington Post

Sunday, March 22, 2009, I'll have an editorial in the Washington Post: "5 Myths on Nuclear Power." It's amazing how fast this started generating a response - on Saturday, as soon as it was put on the website.

One knowledgeable reader emailed me to point out the error in the quote I included from President Harry Truman, at the keel-laying of the USS Nautilus in 1952. Truman said, in effect, that nuclear fission was what powered the sun. It is more accurate, as the reader pointed out to me, to say that nuclear fusion powers the sun. But Truman's point was that nuclear processes are a part of the natural world - the same point I was trying to make. And the quote was accurate, even if Truman's science was not.

For a writer that grew up in a family with several people in the newspaper business, being published in the Washington Post is a real thrill.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/03/20/AR2009032001781.html

Thursday, March 12, 2009

Weird Interview on KSFR Santa Fe

Yesterday (3/11/09) I was interviewed by Diego Mulligan on Santa Fe public radio. He seemed to have booked me in the hopes that I would be an apologist for the nuclear power industry - a strange expectation, since my book centers around a fatal nuclear accident. I did say that I thought reasonable people should look at all power sources as trade offs, a balancing of risks and rewards, but Diego took this as too close to an endorsement of "Big Nuke."

It does seem like nuclear power is one of those things where people who are against it can't acknowledge anything remotely positive. Diego even contended that nuclear power has a big carbon footrprint - because of construction equipment, uranium mining, etc. I guess. He seemed to think that if we really wanted to, we could power everything with windmills and happy thoughts.