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Full Description
In this engaging history, prize-winning author Rebecca Priestley reveals the alternative history of 'nuclear New Zealand' - a country where there was much enthusiasm for nuclear science and technology, from the first users of x-rays and radium in medicine; the young Kiwi physicists seconded to the Manhattan Project; support for British bomb tests in the Pacific; plans for a heavy water plant and a nuclear power station; prospecting for uranium on the West Coast of the South Island; and thousands of scientists and medical professionals working with nuclear technology.
She then considers the dramatic transition to the proudly 'nuclear-free New Zealand' policy in the 1980s. In the late 1970s, less than a decade before, the country had been considering nuclear power to meet growing electricity demand. Following the nuclear-free policy, anything with nuclear associations came under suspicion: taxi drivers referred to a science institute using a particle accelerator as 'the bomb factory' and entertainer Jools Topp refused radiation therapy for cancer, telling the doctors "I'm a lifelong member of Greenpeace, why would I let you irradiate me?"
By uncovering this long and rich history of engagement with the nuclear world and the roots of New Zealand's nuclear-free identity, by leading her readers into popular culture, politics, medicine and science, Priestley reveals much about a culture's evolving attitudes to science and technology and the world beyond its shores.
Contents
Preface -- Nuclear-free New Zealand: Myth or reality? -- Chapter 1: The public are mad on radium! Rutherford, New Zealand and the new physics -- Chapter 2: Some fool in a laboratory: The atom bomb and the dawn of the atomic age -- Chapter 3: Cold War and red-hot science: The nuclear age comes to the Pacific -- Chapter 4: Uranium fever! Uranium prospecting on the West Coast -- Chapter 5: There's strontium-90 in my milk: Safety and public exposure to radiation -- Chapter 6: Atoms for Peace: Nuclear science in New Zealand in the atomic age -- Chapter 7: Nuclear decision: Plans for nuclear power -- Chapter 8: A new national identity: Becoming 'nuclear free' -- Conclusion - A nuclear-free New Zealand? The ideal and the reality -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Index.
