Secret Fallout; Low-level Radiation from Hiroshima to Three-Mile Island

New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1981. First McGraw-Hill Paperback edition [stated], First printing [stated]. Trade paperback. Good. The format is approximately 5.125 inches by 8 inches. xcii, [1], 306 pages. Footnotes. Tabular Data. Bibliography. Glossary. Index. Cover has some wear. Some page discoloration noted. Page 303 restreghtened to spine with glue. Ernest Joachim Sternglass (24 September 1923 - 12 February 2015) was a professor emeritus at the University of Pittsburgh and director of the Radiation and Public Health Project. He is an American physicist and author, best known for his controversial research on the health risks of low-level radiation from atmospheric testing of nuclear weapons and from nuclear power plants. In Washington, D.C. he worked as a civilian employee at the Naval Ordnance Laboratory, which researched military weapons. Sternglass began studying night vision devices, which led him to work with radiation. In 1947 he had the opportunity to meet Albert Einstein. They discussed his results which suggested a low energy creation of neutrons, a work that was rediscovered four decades later. From 1952 to 1967 Sternglass worked at the Westinghouse Research Laboratory. He proposed a technology for image intensification. He also published a formula for interplanetary dust charging, which is still used extensively. He studied fluoroscopy, which "exposes an individual to a considerable dose of radiation." He was put in charge of the Lunar Station program at Westinghouse and he helped to develop the video cameras used in Project Apollo. In 1967, Sternglass moved to the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine and led work on the development of digital X-ray technology for medical imaging. Derived from a Kirkus review: An update of Dr. Sternglass' well-known book on the health effects of low-level radiation, including a new section on Three Mile Island. The author has argued before that the fallout from bomb tests and the radiation released from nuclear reactors are responsible for large increases in infant mortality and declines in test scores. The corollary of his argument is that the military-industrial complex sought to conceal these facts. Dr. Sternglass expected to and claims to have found the same pattern repeated at Three Mile Island: a significant increase in infant mortality among the population exposed to vented gases, and a cover-up. While he is right that the public should be aware that low-level radiation poses risks, his own work has a Cassandra tone. Dr. Sternglass' chief contribution is to bring the issues to view, and, by anchoring the far end of the spectrum, to lend credibility to other scientists proclaiming the perils.