📖 Book report: 'Chain Reactions'

It’s been a little while but I’m back with another video book report for your delectation and this time I’m looking at Chain Reactions: A Hopeful History of Uranium by Lucy Jane Santos, published by Icon Books in the UK and Pegasus books in the US. It’s still a pretty new book - it came out in hardback last year and the paperback version is out at the end of this month (July 2025).

You can get it from Bookshop in the UK here, and in the US here. And if you’re based elsewhere, as always the internet is your ally 😊 Here’s the publishers’ blurb:

Tracing uranium's past, and how it intersects with our understanding of other radioactive elements, this book aims to disentangle our attitudes and to unpick the atomic mindset.

Chain Reactions looks at the fascinating, often-forgotten, stories that can be found throughout the history of the element. Ranging from glassworks to penny stocks; medicines to weapons; something to be feared to a powerful source of energy, this global history not only explores the development of our scientific understanding of uranium, but also shines a light on its cultural and social impact.

By understanding our nuclear past, we can move beyond the ideological opposition to atomic technology and encourage a more nuanced dialogue about whether it is feasible - and desirable - to have a genuinely nuclear-powered future.

A couple of quick show notes.

I talked a bit about the Linear No-Threshold model for assessing cancer risk from radiation exposure, which forms the widely accepted basis for radiation protection in almost all countries around the world. But I forgot to mention that it hit the headlines again recently when the Trump administration issued several executive orders relating to the nuclear industry, including one directing the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission to ‘reconsider’ its use of the model. You can read more on that here: To boost nuclear power, Trump orders controversial rewrite of radiation safety rules

And I’m afraid I suffered an embarrassing menopausal brain freeze over the title of Richard Rhodes’ classic tome on the American nuclear weapons programme. It is of course The Making of The Atomic Bomb.

Lastly, if you’re interested in Lucy Jane Santos’ earlier book on radium that one is called Half Lives: The Unlikely History of Radium.

I’m still finding my feet doing videos like this so if you enjoy this one, you can really give my confidence a boost by letting me know you liked it - by clicking the ❤️ or commenting or replying if you’re getting this over email.

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