Largely little-known stories centered around atomic technologies, entertainingly told with amusing style. What's not to like? ( )

Dr. James Mahaffey's book, "​Atomic Adventures​" contains a number of stories of atomic science, some successes, some failures, but mostly all new and interesting. Topics covered range from cold fusion, dirty bombs, Japanese efforts to develop an atomic bomb during WW II, Argentina's expensive and failed support for rogue scientist promising to develop cold fusion power, lost or stolen radiation sources from field x-ray machines, atomic airplanes, etc. The stories are clear, understandable, and interesting, although some sections will necessarily drift into some talk of atomic matter, scientific instruments, and chemical isotopes. If readers are technophobes, that may be slightly off-putting.
For example, when talking about Argentina's attempt to develop a commercial cold fusion program, Mahaffrey writes: "... Richter's goal was to fuse Lithium-7 and ordinary Hydrogen together​,​ making two Helium-4 nuclei and 17.28 Million electron volts of energy per fusion. He hoped to further devise a way to achieve a self-sustaining fusion process in which the energy produced by a momentary start-up would create enough temperature and pressure to keep the fusion process going as long as it was fed with Lithium and Hydrogen".

Or, in describing the thermal diffusion process​, he writes​: "... The apparatus consisted of a tall vertical column made of nested metal tubes. The innermost metal tube was electrically heated by a Ni-Chrome wire running through the middle. That tube was surrounded by another tube, and a gaseous form of the element that was to have its isotope separated ran through the gap between the two tubes introduced at the bottom of the column. An outermost tube with a gap conducted chilled water from bottom to top giving the gas passage a cold side and a hot side. The lighter U-235 gas would tend to hug the hot surface and rise, while the heavier U-238 was expected to prefer the colder surface and sink. Purified U-235 gas would be drawn off the top of the column. Separating Chlorine-35 from CL-37 had seemed almost simple​. However the difference in the masses of the two isotopic atoms is 5.7% of the lighter atom, whereas in the case of Uranium, the difference in masses between the U-238 and the U-235 atoms is only 1.3%."

​Or, (when talking about a PRI Model 111B deluxe scintillator)​: "... It was a beautiful instrument, all chrome plated with a solid state thallium doped silver iodide crystal glowing every time a gamma ray hit it. The tiny flash was picked up by an RCA 6199 photomultiplier tube, having ten cascading dynodes and running on 1000 volts. It could detect a single photon, and the deluxe scintillator could find a source of radiation down to 0.00001 Rads / hr."

Or, "An optical downconverter uses a powerful laser producing a tightly controlled beam of ultraviolet light. This beam is directed into a non-linear photonic crystal which absorbs each ultraviolet photon and instantly re-emits it as a lower frequency photon. A prime example of a downconverter crystal is the beta barium borate (BBO). Others include Potassium diHydrogen Phosphate (KDP) and Lithium Niobate (LN). A photon's frequency is directly proportional to its energy, with Plank's Constant as the scaling factor. If the photon is converted to one having a lower frequency, then the conservation of energy and momentum at the quantum level demands that the missing energy be accounted for."

​But with exceptions such as shown above, the general text should be clear for all, and the stories are easy to understand. Plus, if there are sections which fail to grab one's interest, the reader can move on and pick up the next story, since one chapter does not depend upon the information in the preceding pages.
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Like a trooper, I listened to the first 45 minutes of this 13.7 hour long book. It got very technical very fast and I lost interest in slogging through a pretty well written book on nuclear physics. My head whipped back and mouth gaped open as my eyes caged in their sockets and consciousness left me. It's just not one of my interests and life is too short to slog through a detained analysis of the structure of an atom. Maybe if it were about one-third as long, it could be tolerated. ( )

James Mahaffey is former senior research scientist in nuclear physics at the Georgia Institute of Technology, who, as he says near the end of this book, now writes books. If you enjoy geeks geeking on about what they love (and I very much do), his books are a lot of fun.

This one is about some of the wilder and woollier adventures in atomic energy, bombs, scientific frauds, and all the things that make a life in science a lot more exciting than someone thinking of it only as, you know, science, might reasonably assume.

Stories include Ronald Richter selling Juan Peron on a fusion reactor project--a vanity project for Peron; for Richter a clever way to get out of Europe after the Second World War. It was based on essentially laboratory trick, for producing a tiny bit of fusion, which unfortunately is impossible to scale up to commercial energy production. Or, well, even small-scale production for research purposes. More than half a century after Richter's Argentine boondoggle, we still appear to be decades away from useful nuclear fusion for energy purposes.

Other stories include dirty bombs and what you should do, and the unwisdom of stealing radioactive materials. For instance, a Chechen rebel stole some cobalt-69, and was dead in thirty minutes. This was really a much better outcome for the rebel than for former Russian spy Alexander Litvinenko poisoned with polonium-210, resulting in an agonizing death over the course of several weeks in 2006. Of course, those of us who grew up during the Cold War expect vile actions by the Russians. What's more startling and disturbing is how often radioactive materials have been used to poison people in the US and other countries, not to make a grand international example of someone, but for the ordinary reasons that lead to stabbings, shootings, and beatings. These attempts are often not successful, but in a way, that's hardly the point. They happen, and it's scary that they do.

On a lighter note, there are the episodes that may have been scientific fraud, or maybe just demonstrations of the fact that the easiest person to fool is yourself. One of those is Fleischman & Pons' announcement of cold fusion in 1989. This would have been a huge breakthrough for the whole world, and it set off a rush to try to duplicate their work. Mahaffey and his colleagues at the Georgia Institute of Technology got involved, and were the first to "confirm" the cold fusion phenomenon... And almost as quickly discovered there was a small problem in their instrumentation. Since they had gone to great effort to reproduce everything they could about Fleisschman & Pons' setup, it's quite likely they'd had the same instrument problem. Mahaffey is able to be truly merciless and gleeful in telling this particular story, because he's a principal in it.

We also get stories of abandoned reactors on forgotten islands, trees that change sex after being irradiated, a totally plausible possible explanation for what really happened at Roswell's Area 51, and accounts of the various efforts made to design an engine that really will let us travel to Mars, and maybe Alpha Centauri.

It's a lot of fun, and also pretty informative. Recommended.

I bought this audiobook. ( )