Books

A new edition of my first book, Cover Up: What You Are Not Supposed to Know About Nuclear Power, is available for FREE, thanks to the publishers, Martin and Judith Shepard.

For a download, just click on Cover Up Sample.

The first edition of the book was published in 1980. For this new edition, I wrote a new preface in the wake of the Fukushima Daiichi disaster and other developments.

The new edition begins:

Nothing in this book has changed. All that has changed is that the reasons are even more obvious, even clearer as to why every nuclear power plant in the world must be shut down—as a matter of life and death.

In Cover Up: What You Are Not Supposed to Know About Nuclear Power, I reprint facsimiles of official documents involving nuclear technology. I believed this was needed in the face of the years of lies of the nuclear promoters—which continue.

Reprinted as it appears, for example, is the passage in “WASH-740-update,” a comprehensive U.S. government report on the consequences of a major nuclear plant accident, that “the possible size of the area of such a disaster might be equal to that of the State of Pennsylvania.” And the line, repeated over and over again in “WASH-740-update,” was written at the government’s Brookhaven National Laboratory a decade before the 1979 accident at the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant almost resulted in that.

The book's introduction states:

You have not been informed about nuclear power. You have not been told. And that has been done on purpose. Keeping the public in the dark was deemed necessary by the promoters of nuclear power if it was to succeed. Those in government, science and private industry who have been pushing nuclear power realized that if people were given the facts, if they knew the consequences of nuclear power, they would not stand for it. If people knew that the kind of accidents that happened at Three Mile Island, at the Fermi Reactor, at Browns Ferry, at Windscale, at “SL-1,” among others—the sort of huge catastrophes which have been only barely avoided—are to be expected, they’d be damned upset and would insist a stop be put to nuclear power.

So an army of public relations practitioners has been working for decades to, in the jargon of the trade, make the people think of “Citizen Atom” as a friend before the truth became manifest.

The “nuclear runaways” and “meltdowns,” the “China syndrome” would come, it was figured. So would the “routine” releases of radiation from nuclear plants—and their results: cancer, leukemia and genetic injury. Also to be expected were illness, injury and death in connection with mining, milling, fuel fabrication, transportation, reactor operation and storing waste—the basic steps of the entire nuclear “cycle.”

Please download a copy of the book and use it and the facsimiles of the documents it contains as a tool in confronting the Nuclear Pinocchios.

In its review of the book, Publishers Weekly said, “Grossman’s powerfully documented book is tough-minded evangelism for the anti-nuke movement….From inside sources, including statements by federal and corporate officials, he makes a strong case for the view that giant nuclear energy corporations have taken extreme measures to hide the shocking facts about nuclear power and are now stalling development of other energy sources to protect their huge investments.”

Among other books I’ve written is The Wrong Stuff: The Space Program’s Nuclear Threat to Our Planet. Published in 1997, it’s about the push to use nuclear power in space—an effort that is also continuing. The Wrong Stuff is available as a used book through Amazon and other online booksellers.

Here's how it begins:

Sunday afternoon, November 17, 1996. President Bill Clinton, vacationing in Hawaii, is interrupted by an urgent message from the U.S. Space Command. The Russian Mars 96 space probe—with a half-pound of deadly plutonium on board—is falling back to Earth. The rocket’s fourth stage misfired after launch the previous day from the Baikonur Space Center in Kazakhstan. Based on its “tracking data,” the U.S. Space Command advises Clinton that it “estimates the spacecraft will reenter the Earth’s atmosphere” in a matter of hours “with a predicted impact point in east-central Australia.”

Clinton calls Australian Prime Minister John Howard—who, coincidentally, the president plans to visit the very next day on his first stop before an Asia tour—and promises “assets we have in the Department of Energy” to deal with any radioactive contamination.

It is early morning in Australia. Howard places the Australian government, military and Emergency Management Australia on full alert. Preparations are made to implement the Australian Contingency Plan for Space Re-Entry Debris, acronym SPRED, developed in 1988 after concerns of a Soviet nuclear-powered satellite, the Cosmos 1900, coming down that year in Australia. At a press conference, Howard informs his country that “I can’t tell you where it is going to land. I can’t tell you when.”

Howard thanks the U.S. president for his phone call while criticizing Russia for failing to provide Australia with any warning about the impending reentry of the car-sized space probe. “It’s obviously one of those situations where there is a proper obligation to share that kind of information in the interests of people taking adequate preparation,” says Howard. He warns that Australians should use “extreme caution” if they come in contact with remnants of the plutonium-bearing Russian probe.

Blurbs on the book’s jacket include the statement of Alan Kohn, a NASA career official, a former NASA emergency preparedness officer, quoted extensively in The Wrong Stuff, that: “NASA calls its plutonium-fueled power systems ‘indestructible;’ they’re indestructible just like the Titanic was unsinkable. And they are committing the lie, the sin of omission, in not telling the whole truth…It’s time to put a stop to their freedom to threaten the lives of people here on Earth.”