Midnight in Chernobyl

Man, nuclear power just seems . . . like a bad idea? (I am intrigued by the thorium reactors Higginbotham mentions at the end but I'm not a scientist!!) I admit that I thought I would understand nuclear power more after reading this and I definitely don't. I do know that a “positive void coefficient” is very, very bad. How you get there or what it actually MEANS is still beyond me.

What was super interesting was the Soviet propaganda machine and the way the USSR handled - or mishandled - the disaster. One of the points the author posits is that Chernobyl contributed to the fall of the Soviet Union which I never really thought about.