Nuclear Law: The Law Applying to Nuclear Installations and Radioactive Substances in its Historic Context, 2d ed.

• Author: Stephens, Tim
• Position: Book review

Stephen Tromans, Nuclear Law: The Law Applying to Nuclear Installations and Radioactive Substances in its Historic Context (Hart Publishing, Oxford, 2nd edition, 2010) ISBN 978-1-841-13857-2-610 pages

'Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.' These were the famous remarks by J Robert Oppenheimer, the scientific director for the Manhattan Project, made upon the first successful detonation of the nuclear bomb. This prophetic reference by Oppenheimer to the sacred Hindu text, the Bhagavad Gita, came to pass in 1945 with the dropping of atomic weapons on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, resulting in the death of over 350,000 people. After the Second World War, attention turned to the potential for using nuclear reactors--built in the race to invent the atomic bomb--for the peaceful purpose of generating energy to supply growing economies.

Despite enthusiastic investment in nuclear power stations from the 1950s onwards, the Manhattan project, and its progeny 'Little Boy' and 'Fat Man', left a troubling impression in the public mind that nuclear technology was dangerous and intended primarily for warfare. A handful of serious accidents have also served to unsettle public confidence in nuclear power and provided the impetus for strong anti-nuclear sentiment, which was successfully fomented and harnessed by the environmental movement in the latter part of the twentieth century.

This hostility to nuclear technology is now ebbing away; governments are beginning to appreciate the enormous abatement in greenhouse gas emissions that can be achieved through the use of nuclear power and that all options for reducing fossil fuel use will have to be considered if civilisation is to combat climate change. New technological developments--which promise safer and more efficient reactors posing negligible proliferation risks--have meant that governments worldwide are re-examining or considering for the first time the potential of nuclear power to meet rising demand for electricity.

This book by Stephen Tromans QC, is a revised and expanded version of the first edition published in 1997, and is a valuable contribution in an era in which nuclear power is enjoying a renaissance. The renewed interest is not uniform worldwide and has been concentrated in states with an established nuclear sector. None the less, several countries with no such history, such as Australia's near neighbour Indonesia, have recently embarked on ambitious nuclear power programs. Australian governments of both political persuasions have not had the courage to take this step, even though Australia has the technological capacity to develop a network of nuclear reactors, holds around a quarter of the world's reserves of uranium, and has one of the most fossil-fuel intensive power generation sectors in the world, resulting in Australians having among the highest per capita greenhouse gas emissions.

Tromans' work focuses on the international, European...