Keith Pearce Bücher

The Chernobyl accident remains of great interest with new books being published and the excellent Sky TV series. These tend to concentrate on the human story. There have also been a number of very detailed and technically demanding discussions about the design, build and operational short falls that contributed to the accident. There has been very little in between the two types of publication. This book is an attempt to find a middle ground; to explain the physics of the Chernobyl accident to those who are interested but are not nuclear reactor experts.To that end this book describes the reactor and the accident and then goes back to explain the physics in more detail before revisiting the accident and trying to explain why the control rods were so far out and why the reactor cooling circuit was full of water at just below the boiling point and how the two anomalies came together to cause the accident.

Cornwall was the first of the Celtic regions of Britain and Ireland to be annexed by the English, and so the first to lose its native language. The linguistic and cultural confusion which resulted from the death of Cornish led to unsubstantiated but persistent traditions that Phoenicians, Saracens and Jews had been present in Cornwall from ancient times and that Jews had controlled and operated the tin industry in medieval times. In this substantial and meticulously researched book, the author applies a critical and penetrating analysis to the place of Jews in Cornish folklore, and also distinguishes the Cornish Jews from the indigenous Cornish Gentiles who adopted Hebrew names, but who are not known to have been of Jewish decent.