The color of infinity inside an empty glass...
Book review: Rad Decision
I found the book, Rad Decision, through a post to my essay on nuclear power. At first I thought the post was automatically generated, but, given the wording, I wasn't sure. I responded to give them a chance and I got a thoughtful reply. A round of applause to James Aach for not spamming or even trying to sell anything.
The book deals well with the technical operation of nuclear power generation. The author obviously has experience in this area and provides a very good description of the inner-workings. The writing is very sympathetic to the plight of the workers in the plant and although the book takes no solid position pro/anti-nuclear, it lays out the benefits and makes it clear that without, we are in serious trouble.
Action in the book is a little slow to build. Characters are introduced for several chapters, along with the operation of nuclear power plants and it's safety features. There is a lot of ground to cover there, with some fairly standard literary devices to help the reader along- a mechanic is hired and shown how the nuclear engineering parts of the plant function, which he understands very little. (This person seems to be in a strange place, getting a tour of the plant by some of the more high-up staff instead of the immediate supervisor one would expect.)
Once the action is set in motion, (around episode 21), I turned into a zombie. I couldn't stop reading the thing, I was rude to company I had over and snuck a few chapters at work. It was a definite "thriller" at this point.
Critical and nit-pick comments:
Several characters seemed to be overdeveloped for the small part they would play. The prologue didn't really tie back in. There are some date typos (episode 21 has 1996 should be 1986). What about the paper in Vitali's pants??? I was a little lost with the Sergai character and his role after Chernobyl, maybe I missed something there. I had trouble with some of the graphics (I couldn't get the "Figure D" links to work), and (a real nit-pick) the introduction says as long as you know "steam is hot" you have what it takes to get through the technical details- water vapor can exist down to below -20 C at low enough pressure- not exactly hot. I mainly nit-pick this because it is an important factor that the boiler is kept under pressure so the water remains liquid at very high temperature (like a pressure-cooker). So I'm a geek, so sue me.
Conclusion:
I really enjoyed the technical parts, (oh, yes, definite geek-time) and most of the characters were well-developed. Overall I give it 3.02 out of π (pi). It was definitely worth the read, and the author is very fair and extremely responsive.
I found the book, Rad Decision, through a post to my essay on nuclear power. At first I thought the post was automatically generated, but, given the wording, I wasn't sure. I responded to give them a chance and I got a thoughtful reply. A round of applause to James Aach for not spamming or even trying to sell anything.
The book deals well with the technical operation of nuclear power generation. The author obviously has experience in this area and provides a very good description of the inner-workings. The writing is very sympathetic to the plight of the workers in the plant and although the book takes no solid position pro/anti-nuclear, it lays out the benefits and makes it clear that without, we are in serious trouble.
Action in the book is a little slow to build. Characters are introduced for several chapters, along with the operation of nuclear power plants and it's safety features. There is a lot of ground to cover there, with some fairly standard literary devices to help the reader along- a mechanic is hired and shown how the nuclear engineering parts of the plant function, which he understands very little. (This person seems to be in a strange place, getting a tour of the plant by some of the more high-up staff instead of the immediate supervisor one would expect.)
Once the action is set in motion, (around episode 21), I turned into a zombie. I couldn't stop reading the thing, I was rude to company I had over and snuck a few chapters at work. It was a definite "thriller" at this point.
Critical and nit-pick comments:
Several characters seemed to be overdeveloped for the small part they would play. The prologue didn't really tie back in. There are some date typos (episode 21 has 1996 should be 1986). What about the paper in Vitali's pants??? I was a little lost with the Sergai character and his role after Chernobyl, maybe I missed something there. I had trouble with some of the graphics (I couldn't get the "Figure D" links to work), and (a real nit-pick) the introduction says as long as you know "steam is hot" you have what it takes to get through the technical details- water vapor can exist down to below -20 C at low enough pressure- not exactly hot. I mainly nit-pick this because it is an important factor that the boiler is kept under pressure so the water remains liquid at very high temperature (like a pressure-cooker). So I'm a geek, so sue me.
Conclusion:
I really enjoyed the technical parts, (oh, yes, definite geek-time) and most of the characters were well-developed. Overall I give it 3.02 out of π (pi). It was definitely worth the read, and the author is very fair and extremely responsive.