In The Road to Yucca Mountain, J. Samuel Walker traces the U.S. government's tangled efforts to solve the technical and political problems associated with radioactive waste. From the Manhattan Project through the designation in 1987 of Yucca Mountain in Nevada as a high-level waste repository, Walker thoroughly investigates the approaches adopted by the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission (AEC). He explains the growing criticism of the AEC's waste programs, such as the AEC's embarrassing failure in its first serious effort to build a high-level waste repository in a Kansas salt mine. Clearly and accessibly, Walker explains the issues surrounding deep geological disposal and surface storage of high-level waste and spent reactor fuel. He analyzes the equally complex and divisive question of fuel “reprocessing.” He weaves reliable research with fresh insights about nuclear science, geology, politics, and public administration, making this original and authoritative account an essential guide for understanding the continuing controversy over an illusive and emotional topic.

The origins of the current nuclear waste disposal crisis and directions for future policy

This new report from the National Research Council's Nuclear and Radiation Studies Board (NRSB) and the Transportation Research Board reviews the risks and technical and societal concerns for the transport of spent nuclear fuel and high-level radioactive waste in the United States. Shipments are expected to increase as the U.S. Department of Energy opens a repository for spent fuel and high-level waste at Yucca Mountain, and the commercial nuclear industry considers constructing a facility in Utah for temporary storage of spent fuel from some of its nuclear waste plants. The report concludes that there are no fundamental technical barriers to the safe transport of spent nuclear fuel and high-level radioactive and the radiological risks of transport are well understood and generally low. However, there are a number of challenges that must be addressed before large-quantity shipping programs can be implemented successfully. Among these are managing "social" risks. The report does not provide an examination of the security of shipments against malevolent acts but recommends that such an examination be carried out.

Story, told in beautiful poetic prose, of the training of a present-day Navajo Indian boy who feels a vocation to become a medicine man.

The senior Senator from New Mexico, Pete V. Domenici, has written a thoughtful assessment of the progress Americans have made in their efforts to bring the benefits of nuclear power to mankind. He outlines what went wrong and why, and in this noble quest, what we must now do to recover from and repudiate past blunders. Senator Domenici has been called Congress' chief apostle for nuclear power and in this book he shares his vision and passion for a renewed commitment, by this nation, and the rest of the world, to the dreams that nuclear energy can help us fulfill. It is also a book about what kind of world our grandchildren could inhabit if we fail in making and keeping such a commitment. Visit our website for sample chapters!

Geoff Manaugh and Nicola Twilley have been researching quarantine since long before the COVID-19 pandemic. With Until Proven Safe, they bring us a book as compelling as it is definitive, not only urgent reading for social-distanced times but also an up-to-the-minute investigation of the interplay of forces–––biological, political, technological––that shape our modern world. Quarantine is our most powerful response to uncertainty: it means waiting to see if something hidden inside us will be revealed. It is also one of our most dangerous, operating through an assumption of guilt. In quarantine, we are considered infectious until proven safe. Until Proven Safe tracks the history and future of quarantine around the globe, chasing the story of emergency isolation through time and space—from the crumbling lazarettos of the Mediterranean, built to contain the Black Death, to an experimental Ebola unit in London, and from the hallways of the CDC to closed-door simulations where pharmaceutical execs and epidemiologists prepare for the outbreak of a novel coronavirus. But the story of quarantine ranges far beyond the history of medical isolation. In Until Proven Safe, the authors tour a nuclear-waste isolation facility beneath the New Mexican desert, see plants stricken with a disease that threatens the world’s wheat supply, and meet NASA’s Planetary Protection Officer, tasked with saving Earth from extraterrestrial infections. They also introduce us to the corporate tech giants hoping to revolutionize quarantine through surveillance and algorithmic prediction. We live in a disorienting historical moment that can feel both unprecedented and inevitable; Until Proven Safe helps us make sense of our new reality through a thrillingly reported, thought-provoking exploration of the meaning of freedom, governance, and mutual responsibility.

The Engineering Group of the Geological Society Working Party brought together experts in glacial and periglacial geomorphology, Quaternary history, engineering geology and geotechnical engineering to establish best practice when working in former glaciated and periglaciated environments. The Working Party addressed outdated terminology and reviewed the latest academic research to provide an up-to-date understanding of glaciated and periglaciated terrains. This transformative, state-of-the-art volume is the outcome of five years of deliberation and synthesis by the Working Party. This is an essential reference text for practitioners, students and academics working in these challenging ground conditions. The narrative style, and a comprehensive glossary and photo-catalogue of active and relict sediments, structures and landforms make this material relevant and accessible to a wide readership.

An essential American novel from Sandra Dallas, an unparalleled writer of our history, and our deepest emotions... During World War II, a family finds life turned upside down when the government opens a Japanese internment camp in their small Colorado town. After a young girl is murdered, all eyes (and suspicions) turn to the newcomers, the interlopers, the strangers. This is Tallgrass as Rennie Stroud has never seen it before. She has just turned thirteen and, until this time, life has pretty much been what her father told her it should be: predictable and fair. But now the winds of change are coming and, with them, a shift in her perspective. And Rennie will discover secrets that can destroy even the most sacred things. Part thriller, part historical novel, Tallgrass is a riveting exploration of the darkest--and best--parts of the human heart.

Backpacking California is a collection of more than 70 of the most intriguing backpacking adventures in Wilderness Press's home territory of California. With contributions from more than a dozen Wilderness Press authors, the book describes routes ranging from one night to one week. Backpacking novices as well as "old hand" California hikers will find expert-crafted trips in the Coast Ranges, the Sierra, the Cascades, and the Warner Mountains. Expanded coverage includes trips in Big Sur, Anza-Borrego, Death Valley, and the White Mountains. Several trips have been described in print nowhere else. Each trip includes a trail map and essential logistical information for trip planning.

The cult-y pocket-size field guide to the strange and intriguing secrets of the Mojave—its myths and legends, outcasts and oddballs, flora, fauna, and UFOs—becomes the definitive, oracular book of the desert For the past five years, Desert Oracle has existed as a quasi-mythical, quarterly periodical available to the very determined only by subscription or at the odd desert-town gas station or the occasional hipster boutique, its canary-yellow-covered, forty-four-page issues handed from one curious desert zealot to the next, word spreading faster than the printers could keep up with. It became a radio show, a podcast, a live performance. Now, for the first time—and including both classic and new, never-before-seen revelations—Desert Oracle has been bound between two hard covers and is available to you. Straight out of Joshua Tree, California, Desert Oracle is “The Voice of the Desert”: a field guide to the strange tales, singing sand dunes, sagebrush trails, artists and aliens, authors and oddballs, ghost towns and modern legends, musicians and mystics, scorpions and saguaros, out there in the sand. Desert Oracle is your companion at a roadside diner, around a campfire, in your tent or cabin (or high-rise apartment or suburban living room) as the wind and the coyotes howl outside at night. From journal entries of long-deceased adventurers to stray railroad ad copy, and musings on everything from desert flora, rumored cryptid sightings, and other paranormal phenomena, Ken Layne's Desert Oracle collects the weird and the wonderful of the American Southwest into a single, essential volume.