Even as plants were being built, the numbers used by officials to describe the likelihood of an accident were based on “expert guesswork or calculations that often produced absurd results,” he writes. took it for granted that “catastrophic accidents” were possible the key question was: What were the chances? The long and the short of it, Wellock’s book suggests, is that, while many officials believed the chances were very low, nobody really knew for sure how low they were or could prove it scientifically. Technically astute insiders at the A.E.C. “ Safe Enough? A History of Nuclear Power and Accident Risk” is a refreshingly candid account of how the government, from the nineteen-forties onward, approached the bottom-line question posed in the book’s title. Atomic Energy Commission (A.E.C.), has regulated civilian nuclear power. in history from Berkeley-and, in March of 2021, published the sixth in a series of authorized volumes about how the agency, and its predecessor, the U.S. He brought chops to the job-training in engineering, experience testing nuclear reactors, and a Ph.D. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (N.R.C.) more than a decade ago. Thomas Wellock, formerly a professor at Central Washington University, became the historian of the U.S. They permit quasi-independent, in-house scholars to poke through their business, potentially releasing information that would have brought the agency to its knees if it had been revealed in more timely fashion. Because these histories are usually published, in installments, long after the events they describe, agencies somehow relax.

Their job is to sift, with scholarly thoroughness, through raw, archival evidence, in order to determine how well or badly an agency has carried out its mission.

There are hundreds of them working for the various federal agencies in the U.S., salary and benefits decent. But there is an easier way to look at government secrets and even peruse them at leisure: just be appointed an official government historian.

In the United States, outsiders with resources and persistence, such as activists and journalists, can try to use the legal crowbar of the Freedom of Information Act to pry facts loose. Keeping good records is a cardinal rule of bureaucracy, and at government agencies routinely hiding the sensitive ones, and utterly suppressing the most embarrassing ones, is the prevailing general imperative.

Power factory 15 crack