The Atom And The Fault

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The Atom and the Fault

With wit and thoughtful compassion, Richard Meehan presents one of the most perplexing of contemporary moral predicaments, one that arises in every attempt to assess potentially hazardous technologies. He focuses on the longrunning controversy over suspected earthquake faults near the nation's first corporately owned nuclear test reactor at Vallecitos, California, and uses this account of "the politics of expertise" to probe the nature of scientific truth and its relationship to the determination of public safety. At Vallecitos, Meehan points out, the opinions of the "experts" were radically divided. Where one group saw clear and ominous evidence of an earthquake fault in trenches dug at this showpiece site, others saw only the mark of an ancient landslide. How did these experts arrive at their opinions? Were they simply representing corporate, as opposed to environmentalist, points of view? And how are the public regulatory agencies charged with deciding such issues supposed to balance these seemingly irreconcilable opinions? The Atom and the Faultexplores these crucial questions as the issue of the earthquake safety of nuclear power plants continues to grow into a struggle encompassing government regulatory bodies, public utilities, private industry, engineers, geologists, and citizen activists. It paints candid portraits of the principal expert players, clarifies the difficult and often delicate interplay of honesty and loyalties among them, and lucidly explains the technical issues and viewpoints involved. As a professional participant in several environmental controversies in which so-called scientific facts were represented by opposing points of view, Meehan is uniquely qualified to tell this tale. He is a consultant to industry, government agencies, and law firms specializing in forecasting and damage assessment related to earthquakes and land failures, and an adjunct professor in the Values, Technology, Science, and Society program at Stanford University. His first book, Getting Sued and Other Tales of the Engineering Life was published by The MIT Press in 1981.
Proceedings of the 17th International Conference on the Physics of Semiconductors

Author: J.D. Chadi
language: en
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
Release Date: 2013-12-01
The Proceedings of the 17th International Conference on the Physics of Semiconductors are contained in this volume. A record 1050 scientists from 40 countries participated in the Conference which was held in San Francisco August 6·1 0, 1984. The Conference was organized by the ICPS Committee and sponsored by the International Union of Pure and Applied Physics and other professional, government, and industrial organizations listed on the following pages. Papers representing progress in all aspects of semiconductor physics were presented. Far more abstracts (765) than could be presented in a five-day meeting were considered by the International Program Committee. A total of 350 papers, consisting of 5 plenary, 35 invited, and 310 contributed, were presented at the Conference in either oral or poster sessions. All but a few of the papers were submitted and have been included in these Proceedings. An interesting shift in subject matter, in comparison with earlier Conferences, is manifested by the large number of papers on surfaces, interfaces, and quantum wells. To facilitate the use of the Proceedings in finding closely related papers among the sometimes relatively large number of contributions within a main subject area, we chose not to arrange the papers strictly according to the Conference schedule. We have organized the book, as can be seen from the Contents, into specific subcategories and subdivisions within each major category. Plenary and invited papers have been placed together with the appropriate contributed papers.
Materials Structure & Micromechanics of Fracture VII

Author: Pavel Šandera
language: en
Publisher: Trans Tech Publications Ltd
Release Date: 2013-11-15
Selected, peer reviewed papers from the 7th International Conference on Materials Structure & Micromechanics of Fracture (MSMF-7), July 1-3, 2013, Brno, Czech Republic