Nuclear energy today and tomorrow

Nuclear energy today and tomorrow

Journal of NuclearEnemy, Vol.26,p. 385.Permmon Press1972.Printed in NonhemIreland BOOK REVIEW Nuclear Energy Today and Tomorrow, D. Z. ROBINSON,C. B...

74KB Sizes 0 Downloads 31 Views

Journal of NuclearEnemy, Vol.26,p. 385.Permmon Press1972.Printed in NonhemIreland

BOOK REVIEW

Nuclear Energy Today and Tomorrow, D. Z. ROBINSON,C. B. A. MCCUSKER, P. W. MCDANIEL, W. K. H. PANOFSKYand R. M. DALITZ, Heinemann, 473 pp., E3.00. MANY BOOKSwhich result from a series of lectures suffer from unevenness of standard and presentation. This one is no exception. It has four broad divisions; science and society, peaceful uses of the atom, cosmic radiation and particle physics, so the coverage is wide in subject matter and it is dilhcult to see to whom it will appeal. Although much of it obviously results from the lectures as originally presented to fifth-year school children, parts of it are much above that standard. The first section on science and society is short and is entirely biased to United States thinking and to the situation in the U.S.A. The second section on peaceful uses of the atom forms a substantial part. It starts with the development of uses for isotopes and radiation and gives a broad general but superlicial account of the topic. Nuclear power development is a very sketchy account of the fission process and how a nuclear reactor works, with a discussion of a number of U.S. reactor systems. Nuclear generators and reactors for use in space largely consists of very short accounts of a large number of these devices. The section on large-scale industrial and social uses for cheap nuclear power deals mainly with the need for desalting and possible peaceful uses of nuclear explosions. A large part of the section on the feasibility of controlling thermonuclear reactions is devoted to describing particular U.S. devices. The next short section of the book is a good simple account of the discovery of cosmic radiation and of the search for fundamental particles and their origins. The largest part of the book deals with particle physics. It deals with the families of elementary particles and some of their characteristics, the interaction and identification of different particles, and the means by which they are produced in accelerators. There is some account of the characteristics of the different kinds of accelerators, including a whole chapter devoted to the Stanford linear accelerator. This is followed by a discussion of methods of detection and analysis. Finally, fundamental matters, such as symmetries and selection rules, hadron physics and unitary symmetry, weak decay interactions and searches for the quark are dealt with. Considerable sections of the book contain descriptions of many similar systems and the material is stretched out by many diagrams which are indistinct or of no particular value. The bias of the book is very much American and it would be more acceptable if other countries’ machines and equipment were given a greater mention. J. F. HILL

385