CONFESSIONS OF A ROGUE NUCLEAR REGULATOR

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CONFESSIONS OF A ROGUE NUCLEAR REGULATOR

Name: CONFESSIONS OF A ROGUE NUCLEAR REGULATOR
Author: Gregory B. Jaczko
ISBN: 978-1-4767-5576-2

by Gregory B. Jaczko ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 15, 2019

A cautionary tale with a matter-of-fact tone.

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The political education of a scientist-turned–nuclear energy regulator.

As chairman of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission under President Barack Obama, Jaczko was not a political insider; nor was he beholden to the industry that had invested and reaped billions of dollars from the proliferation of nuclear energy. He maintains that he was “a nuclear power moderate” when appointed to the commission, though one who “had become skeptical of the ability of the nuclear power industry to properly balance its fiscal responsibility to shareholders with the demands of public safety.” As with many regulatory agencies, nuclear power regulation seems to suffer from a fox-guarding-the-henhouse mentality. The financial stakes are huge, not only for the industry, but for those who benefit from the jobs the industry creates and the taxes it pays, which often support the communities where the reactors are located. Accidents are rare, but when they occur, as the lingering memory of Three Mile Island reminds us, the results can be devastating. Better safe than sorry, but how safe is safe? “What constitutes ‘safety’ is often determined by political, not just scientific, judgments,” writes the author, who experienced political resistance funded by anti-regulation lobbying throughout his tenure. “I was hardly anyone’s first choice for the job,” he admits, as even the Obama administration that appointed him expressed skepticism over his lack of administrative experience and the staffers he would oversee weren’t accustomed to working with someone so young (early 40s). Jaczko found himself consistently at odds not only with the industry he was charged with regulating and with their congressional supporters, but with the rest of his commission. The more he pushed for safeguards following the Japanese Fukushima accident in 2011, the stronger such resistance became, and he admits that “sometimes I behaved in a way that could be described as hotheaded.” Since resigning in 2012, he now advocates from the outside and maintains that “nuclear power is a failed technology.”

A cautionary tale with a matter-of-fact tone.

Pub Date: Jan. 15, 2019

ISBN: 978-1-4767-5576-2

Page Count: 208

Publisher: Simon & Schuster

Review Posted Online: Oct. 1, 2018

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2018

Categories:

CURRENT EVENTS & SOCIAL ISSUES | U.S. GOVERNMENT | PUBLIC POLICY | GENERAL CURRENT EVENTS & SOCIAL ISSUES

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A PEOPLE'S HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES

by Howard Zinn ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 1, 1979

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For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.

Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979

ISBN: 0061965588

Page Count: 772

Publisher: Harper & Row

Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979

Categories:

- BOOK REVIEW
A YOUNG PEOPLE'S HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES
by Howard Zinn ; adapted by Rebecca Stefoff with by Ed Morales

- BOOK REVIEW
TRUTH HAS A POWER OF ITS OWN
by Howard Zinn with Ray Suarez

- BOOK REVIEW
THE HISTORIC UNFULFILLED PROMISE
by Howard Zinn

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I KNOW WHY THE CAGED BIRD SINGS

by Maya Angelou ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 1, 1969

However charily one should apply the word, a beautiful book, an unconditionally involving memoir for our time or any time.

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Maya Angelou is a natural writer with an inordinate sense of life and she has written an exceptional autobiographical narrative which retrieves her first sixteen years from "the general darkness just beyond the great blinkers of childhood."

Her story is told in scenes, ineluctably moving scenes, from the time when she and her brother were sent by her fancy living parents to Stamps, Arkansas, and a grandmother who had the local Store. Displaced they were and "If growing up is painful for the Southern Black girl, being aware of her displacement is the rust on the razor that threatens the throat." But alternating with all the pain and terror (her rape at the age of eight when in St. Louis With her mother) and humiliation (a brief spell in the kitchen of a white woman who refused to remember her name) and fear (of a lynchingâ€”and the time they buried afflicted Uncle Willie under a blanket of vegetables) as well as all the unanswered and unanswerable questions, there are affirmative memories and moments: her charming brother Bailey; her own "unshakable God"; a revival meeting in a tent; her 8th grade graduation; and at the end, when she's sixteen, the birth of a baby. Times When as she says "It seemed that the peace of a day's ending was an assurance that the covenant God made with children, Negroes and the crippled was still in effect."

However charily one should apply the word, a beautiful book, an unconditionally involving memoir for our time or any time.