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Book Reviews

Dangerous nuclear fantasies

Plutonium: How Nuclear Power’s Dream Fuel Became a Nightmare Frank von Hippel, Masafumi Takubo, and Jungmin Kang (Singapore: Springer Nature Singapore, 2019), 154 pages, US$34.99 (hardcover), US$24.99 (eBook).

 

Notes

1 Glenn Seaborg, “The Plutonium Economy of the Future,” remarks delivered at the Fourth International Conference on Plutonium and Other Actinides, Santa Fe, New Mexico, October 5, 1970, <http://fissilematerials.org/library/aec70.pdf>.

2 John Carlson, “The Case for a Pause in Reprocessing in East Asia: Economic Aspects,” Nuclear Threat Initiative, August 2016 <http://www.nti.org/analysis/reports/case-pause-reprocessing-east-asiaeconomic-aspects/>.

3 International Panel on Fissile Materials, “Fissile Material Stocks,” May 2, 2022, <https://fissilematerials.org/>.

4 World Nuclear News, “Rosatom postpones fast reactor project, report says,” August 13, 2019, <http://world-nuclear-news.org/Articles/Rosatom-postpones-fast-reactor-project-report-say>.

5 World Nuclear News, “Russia starts building lead-cooled fast reactor,” June 8, 2021 <https://www.world-nuclear-news.org/Articles/Russia-starts-building-lead-cooled-fast-reactor>.

6 Frank von Hippel and Jungmin Kang, “Why joint US-South Korean research on plutonium separation raises nuclear proliferation danger,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, January 13, 2022, https://thebulletin.org/2022/01/why-joint-us-south-korean-research-on-plutonium-separation-raises-nuclear-proliferation-danger/.

7 R. Bari et al., “Proliferation Risk Reduction Study of Alternative Spent Fuel Processing,” BNL-90264-2009-CP, Brookhaven National Laboratory, 2009, <https://www.bnl.gov/isd/documents/70289.pdf>.

8 Zi-Hoon Lee, “Korea’s Yoon govt to raise nuclear power to 34% of energy source,” Korea Economic Daily, April 21, 2022, <https://www.kedglobal.com/business-politics/newsView/ked202204210007>.

9 Raymond S. Nickerson, “Confirmation bias: A ubiquitous phenomenon in many guises,” Review of General Psychology, Vol. 2, No. 2 (June 1998), pp. 175–220; M. E. Oswald and Stefan Grosjean, “Confirmation bias,” in Rüdiger F. Pohl, ed., Cognitive Illusions: A Handbook on Fallacies and Biases in Thinking, Judgement and Memory (New York: Psychology Press, 2004), pp. 79–96; P. C. Wason, “On the failure to eliminate hypotheses in a conceptual task,” Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, Vol. 12, No. 3 (1960), pp. 129–40, <https://bear.warrington.ufl.edu/brenner/mar7588/Papers/wason-qjep1960.pdf>.

10 Toby Dalton and Alexandra Francis, “South Korea’s Search for Nuclear Sovereignty,” Asia Policy, No. 19 (January 2015), pp. 115–36.

11 Hal R. Arkes and Catherine Blumer, “The psychology of sunk cost,” Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, Vol. 35, No. 1 (1985), pp. 124–40, <https://www.researchgate.net/publication/4812596_The_psychology_of_sunk_cost>; Brian M. Sweis, Samantha V. Abram, Brandy J. Schmidt, Kelsey D. Seeland, Angus W. MacDonald, Mark J. Thomas, and A. David Redish, “Sensitivity to ‘sunk costs’ in mice, rats, and humans,” Science, Vol. 361, No. 6398 (July 13, 2018), pp. 178–81, <https://doi.org/10.1126/science.aar8644>; Richard H. Thaler, “Mental accounting matters,” Journal of Behavioral Decision Making, Vol. 12, No. 3 (September 1999), pp. 183–206, <https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/(SICI)1099-0771(199909)12:3%3C183::AID-BDM318%3E3.0.CO;2-F>.

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