the Unstable Atom: Radioactivity, Nucleus, and Century It Rewrote

In 1896 a physicist put a wrapped photographic plate in a drawer with a lump of uranium salt on top, expecting nothing. The plate came out fogged. Nothing had shone on it. Something inside the rock had reached through the paper on its own. That drawer is where the twentieth century starts. Within fifty years the same phenomenon had dated the Earth, split the atom, lit a city, leveled another, and become the first thing most people think of when they hear the word risk. Thirty-nine chapters. No physics background required. The whole century, from a shed on the Rue Lhomond to elements that do not exist yet. - How the rays were sorted into three kinds, and what each one actually is - The gold foil experiment that revealed the nucleus, and why the atom should have collapsed - Reading the chart of the nuclides like a map, and why some numbers are magic - The single curve that explains both the reactor and the bomb - Why an individual atom is unpredictable and a trillion of them are a clock - Carbon-14, and the calibration problem nobody mentions - How rocks and meteorites gave the Earth its age - A uranium nucleus split in a Berlin basement, and where every neutron goes afterward - From yellowcake to fuel rod, and what happens inside a working reactor - The physics of a supercritical mass, as it was actually built - A test gone wrong at Reactor Number Four, and fifteen meters of water at Fukushima - What to do with the ashes, and the reactors designed to fail toward cold - Borrowing the Sun's reaction, and why plasma refuses to be held - Becquerels, grays and sieverts, explained so they stay explained - How radiation damages a cell, and the unresolved argument over small doses - Tracers that light up the body, and aiming radiation at a tumor - The background you were born into, and where it comes from - Counting the dead honestly, at Chernobyl and everywhere else - The real cost of building a reactor, and elements that do not exist yet Including the numbers people argue about. How many deaths, at what dose, over what time, with the uncertainties stated instead of hidden. The book takes no side on nuclear power. It gives you enough to take your own. This is the story of the one part of the atom that will not sit still, and everything humans have built, broken and learned because of it. Scroll up and start reading.