Progress: 9/52
Well, that was frightening. Summary: The state of nuclear power in the world is pretty scary and not likely to get better.
I’m justifying my placement of this book into “Hardware and Technical Stuff” because there is a decent amount of explanation about how nuclear power works. Especially in the appendix, where it talks about the guts of the power generation and also has some disturbing descriptions of what radiation can do to the human body.
But the real thrust of the book is the politics and economics - how those forces are preventing regulatory bodies from enforcing safety rules on the nuclear power industry. Regulatory capture is the relevant term here: when an industry wields such influence over how regulation is done that they’re writing their own rules. And when you’re talking about an industry where even a minor failure is dangerous, and a major one is a massive disaster, that’s a scary thing to contemplate.