Fusion & Fission Books

Bad Science: The Short Life and Weird Times of Cold Fusion

Gary Taubes

List Price: $25.00 By: Random House Amazon Marketplace: 19 new & used starting at $2.98

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 5 Average rating: 3.0 of 5

Mr. Taubes' book is seriously truncated and misleading 1 out of 5 stars.
16 of 50 people found this review helpful.

When the original Cold Fusion press conference was held on 3-23-89, the reaction of the physics establishment in the first world was immediate , orchestrated and highly hostile. Mr. Taubes book is an effort to spin-doctor an entire area of emerging global science out of exisitence . As of 3-23-99 there are over 3000 peer reviewed scientific papers available in this area of science with nearly every institution connected with nuclear phenomena having checked in. Mr. Taubes confines himself with attacking Drs. Fleischmann and Pons during the begining few years of this controversy and ignoring the mountain of official replications: EPRI, US Naval Weapons Lab China Lake, U of Minnesota, MITI et al... If you want to see how "black propaganda" works read this tome. I recommend it to anyone getting involved in the "new Energy" movement to get a temper of the opposition. As Lord Macaulay put it over a century ago " If a big enough commercial interest were threatened, even Newton's law of Gravity would be called into question". Dana Rotegard, Minnesota Cold Fusion Alliance Former technical consultant Janes Space Markets, Asst. Ed., Futurics, Future Trends Newsletter

Editorial Review:

A science journalist brings to life one of the greatest scientific frauds of our times with the story of the two obscure researchers who claimed to have discovered a clean, no-fuss method for harnessing the energy of a hydrogen bomb. 20,000 first printing.

Japan's Secret War: Japan's Race Against Time to Build Its Own Atomic Bomb

Robert K. Wilcox

List Price: $12.95 By: Marlowe & Company Amazon Marketplace: 18 new & used starting at $5.45

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 11 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

States how close we came to atomic destruction 5 out of 5 stars.
8 of 17 people found this review helpful.

Although personally I believe that they are never any real winners in wars. The winning side may suffer economic problems after and deal with the repercussions of what they did to win, the losing side may get economic sanctions placed on them that will cause suffering, or be looked at as a evil and terrible race. This book does states accurately using declassified WW2 documents how close the Japanese came to bombing us first. My dad told me that they were a day or two from mastering the A bomb, when we did it first, and well he was right. In this book the author interviews a japanese woman whose dad was a scientist on the Atomic Project is obviously upset that he was digging up history because she said to him:
"Whay are you trying to do this anyways? So the americans are justified in thier decision?"
He states back (rather surprised):
"Its that theres information out there to be learned and I wish to know."
Im paraphrasing from my memory when I read this book from a library so its prolly not entirely word for word, its a definite read for anyone who is interested in the "hidden" history of WW2.

Fusion: The Search for Endless Energy

Robin Herman

Amazon Price: $130.00 List Price: $130.00 Usually ships in 24 hours By: Cambridge University Press Amazon Marketplace: 50 new & used starting at $4.52

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Editorial Review:

The book abounds with fascinating anecdotes about fusion's rocky path: the spurious claim by Argentine dictator Juan Peron in 1951 that his country had built a working fusion reactor, the rush by the United States to drop secrecy and publicize its fusion work as a propaganda offensive after the Russian success with Sputnik; the fortune Penthouse magazine publisher Bob Guccione sank into an unconventional fusion device, the skepticism that met an assertion by two University of Utah chemists in 1989 that they had created "cold fusion" in a bottle. Aimed at a general audience, the book describes the scientific basis of controlled fusion--the fusing of atomic nuclei, under conditions hotter than the sun, to release energy. Using personal recollections of scientists involved, it traces the history of this little-known international race that began during the Cold War in secret laboratories in the United States, Great Britain and the Soviet Union, and evolved into an astonishingly open collaboration between East and West.

The Fusion Quest

T. Kenneth Fowler

List Price: $54.95 By: The Johns Hopkins University Press Amazon Marketplace: 15 new & used starting at $3.98

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 2 Average rating: 3.0 of 5

Endless Quest 2 out of 5 stars.
0 of 2 people found this review helpful.

My first encounter with nuclear fusion was when I witnessed a test of the University of Texas at Austin tokomak reactor during 1975. Sparks the size of my fist jumped as the huge relays closed, sending thousands of amps of current surging the the huge electromagnets that would squeeze the tenuous torus of hydrogen gas into an inferno hotter than the sun -- crushing hydrogen nuclei together to produce energy. Nuclear fusion held the shining promise of limitless cheap energy, with virtually no radioactive waste or accident risk. Since that time I have watched incredulously as national fusion effort foundered helplessly, while our nation squandered its resources on foreign petroleum, and burned into greenhouse gases. After reading this book, I have a better understanding of why we failed. The problem is not money -- Fowler recounts the millions spent of muscular hardware. The real problem is the inability of our nation to harvest our best minds to work on the promise of limitless energy, and the failure of nerve by our country's leaders to make fusion a goal. It will take more than this book to revitalize the fusion effort -- it reads like a dull college lecture, complete with tests at the end. Nevertheless, fusion students will appreciate a chance to aquaint themselves with the specialized terminology and details of this specialized field of physics. Real fusion enthusiasts might be curious enough to look at a less successful attempt at fusion -- Fire from Ice: Searching for the Truth Behind the Cold Fusion Furor by Eugene J. Mallove.

--Auralgo

Editorial Review:

Fusion as a source of energy has been a long-sought but never-achieved dream of the scientific establishment. The idea sounds simple enough: create cheap, limitless energy by the same processes that fuel the sun. The problem, however, is scale: how to reproduce the continual fusion of hydrogen atom nuclei in a reactor that is much, much smaller than the sun. This is the puzzle T. Kenneth Fowler describes in Fusion Quest, a book that argues passionately in favor of continued fusion research. Though there has yet been little success in the field, Fowler insists that so much progress has been made that fusion power will likely be possible within the next century. He spends most of the book explaining the challenges that face physicists in realizing this dream. The Fusion Quest is more technical than the average popular science book and will probably appeal more to those readers who have some background in physics and mathematics.

The Day the Sun Rose Twice: The Story of the Trinity Site Nuclear Explosion, July 16, 1945

Ferenc Morton Szasz

Amazon Price: $17.95 List Price: $19.95 Usually ships in 24 hours By: University of New Mexico Press Amazon Marketplace: 40 new & used starting at $5.95

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 5 Average rating: 3.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

First published in 1984, this prize-winning history of the Manhattan Project is now available in paperback for the first time, fifty years after the explosion of the first atomic bomb.

"This tightly focused, lucidly written and thoroughly researched book. . . describes the events, personalities and scientific processes that led to the detonation of the first atomic bomb in an isolated stretch of New Mexican desert. . . . Mr. Szasz provides fascinating details. . . . The Day the Sun Rose Twice is concise and cogent, a valuable introduction to how our nuclear dilemma began."—New York Times Book Review

"May be the definitive account of the days and hours leading up to the first nuclear explosion in history and the legacy it left. He vividly reconstructs the story: the industrious atmosphere of the scientists and technicians; the grave considerations of those making key decisions; the sense of wonder, and twinges of conscience, at what had been achieved."—Los Angeles Times

Fusion: A Voyage Through the Plasma Universe (Plasma Physics Series)

Hans Wilhelmsson

Amazon Price: $39.99 List Price: $39.99 Usually ships in 24 hours By: Taylor & Francis Amazon Marketplace: 10 new & used starting at $25.00

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Total reviews: 1 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

This book tells the fascinating story of fusion. As the process that fuels the stars and galaxies lighting up the night sky, fusion is the main source of energy in our Universe. We owe our very existence to the warmth of the Sun that it generates and, at the start of the new milllennium, fusion may prove to be the only sustainable way to meet the long-term energy demands of modern society.

Professor Hans Wilhelmsson shares with us his delight and his 50 year, life-long dream as one of fusion's main contemporary figures, to recreate on Earth the conditions that give rise to fusion at the heart of the Sun. He takes us through time on an epic voyage where we meet Nobel prize winning characters such as Neils Bohr, Hannes Alfven and Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar and the any cultural inspirations that have brought us to the brink of achieving controlled fusion in the laboratory. He charts the Universe stopping en route to explain how fusion and its vehicle, plasma physics, lies behind some of the most awe-inspiring phenomena in the Cosmos, from jets and quasars to the beautiful Aurora Borealis - the Northern Lights.

Forever insightful, the author shows not only the links between developments in space and laboratory plasma physics, he also presents 16 rare and original color plates to highlight the relevance and parallels in the work of Vincent Van Gogh, Leonardo da Vinci and Max Ernst to the fusion quest.

Japan's Secret War

Robert K. Wilcox

List Price: $15.95 By: William Morrow & Company Amazon Marketplace: 14 new & used starting at $15.65

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 1 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Sure! Well, maybe... 4 out of 5 stars.
4 of 4 people found this review helpful.

You'll never read Wilcox's theory in your high school history texts. Well, if you believe the U.S. government never lied about or covered up anything, put on your dunce cap and give me twenty pushups. It would appear that both the allies and axis were well on the road to nuclear discover, with the probable exceptions of Italy and Spain, as scientic documents of nuclear interest were freely available and the Manhattan Project was not able to keep the lid on their little secrets. While the FDR team had the lead in tenacity, resources, and money, Germany was well into development as was, according to Wilcox, Japan. Traditionally portrayed as the first victim of the nuclear age, Japan may merely have been slower on the draw, lacking the resources and political cooperation of the U.S. Otherwise, San Franciso may have been transformed into green glass and the invasion of Japan tranformed into an insurmountable task. The bad each country did during conflict would have filled the heavens with stench. There is no reason to believe that, for some altruistic ends, Japan would fail to play the only winning card it had left. So, the book unfolds and the U.S. and Japanese goverments went out of the way to deny Japan's probable attempt to enter the nuclear age. Then, Russia did not help by carrying off everything, probably including top Japanese scientists, from North Korea and forbidding entry to that area by the West. Stalin's cronies did not even let the cat out of the bag about Hitler's skull until more than five decades later. So, do not expect any confirmation from those folks. Wilcox's supposition deserves serious thought and his book deserves wider publication.

Stellarator and Heliotron Devices (International Series of Monographs on Physics)

Masahiro Wakatani

Amazon Price: $210.00 List Price: $210.00 Usually ships in 24 hours By: Oxford University Press, USA Amazon Marketplace: 30 new & used starting at $16.50

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Editorial Review:

This monograph describes plasma physics for magnetic confinement of high temperature plasmas in nonaxisymmetric toroidal magnetic fields or stellarators. The author covers all aspects of magnetic confinement, formation of magnetic surfaces, magnetohydrodynamic equilibrium and stability, single charged particle confinement, neoclassical transport and plasma heating.