With wit and thoughtful compassion, Richard Meehan presents one of the most perplexing of contemporary moral predicaments, one that arises in every attempt to assess potentially hazardous technologies. He focuses on the longrunning controversy over suspected earthquake faults near the nation's first corporately owned nuclear test reactor at Vallecitos, California, and uses this account of "the politics of expertise" to probe the nature of scientific truth and its relationship to the determination of public safety. At Vallecitos, Meehan points out, the opinions of the "experts" were radically divided. Where one group saw clear and ominous evidence of an earthquake fault in trenches dug at this showpiece site, others saw only the mark of an ancient landslide. How did these experts arrive at their opinions? Were they simply representing corporate, as opposed to environmentalist, points of view? And how are the public regulatory agencies charged with deciding such issues supposed to balance these seemingly irreconcilable opinions? The Atom and the Faultexplores these crucial questions as the issue of the earthquake safety of nuclear power plants continues to grow into a struggle encompassing government regulatory bodies, public utilities, private industry, engineers, geologists, and citizen activists. It paints candid portraits of the principal expert players, clarifies the difficult and often delicate interplay of honesty and loyalties among them, and lucidly explains the technical issues and viewpoints involved. As a professional participant in several environmental controversies in which so-called scientific facts were represented by opposing points of view, Meehan is uniquely qualified to tell this tale. He is a consultant to industry, government agencies, and law firms specializing in forecasting and damage assessment related to earthquakes and land failures, and an adjunct professor in the Values, Technology, Science, and Society program at Stanford University. His first book, Getting Sued and Other Tales of the Engineering Life was published by The MIT Press in 1981.

The late 1960s saw an extraordinary growth in the American nuclear industry: dozens of plants of unprecedented size were ordered throughout the country. Yet at the same time, public concern about the natural environment and suspicion of both government and industry increased dramatically. Containing the Atom is the first scholarly history of nuclear power regulation during those tumultuous years. J. Samuel Walker focuses on the activities of the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission, the agency entrusted with the primary responsibility for the safety of nuclear power, and shows that from the beginning the AEC faced a paradox: it was charged with both promoting and controlling the nuclear power industry. Out of this paradox grew severe tensions, which Walker discusses in detail. His balanced evaluation of the issues and the positions taken by the AEC and others makes this study an invaluable resource for all those interested in the continuing controversies that surround nuclear energy. The late 1960s saw an extraordinary growth in the American nuclear industry: dozens of plants of unprecedented size were ordered throughout the country. Yet at the same time, public concern about the natural environment and suspicion of both government and industry increased dramatically. Containing the Atom is the first scholarly history of nuclear power regulation during those tumultuous years. J. Samuel Walker focuses on the activities of the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission, the agency entrusted with the primary responsibility for the safety of nuclear power, and shows that from the beginning the AEC faced a paradox: it was charged with both promoting and controlling the nuclear power industry. Out of this paradox grew severe tensions, which Walker discusses in detail. His balanced evaluation of the issues and the positions taken by the AEC and others makes this study an invaluable resource for all those interested in the continuing controversies that surround nuclear energy.

The history of physics furnishes many examples of how a simple semiem pirical method, essentially based on intuitive considerations, may prove to be much more successful than a rigorous theoretical approach. A pertinent example is the method of atom-atom potentials, which treats the intermolec ular interactions between polyatomic molecules in terms of pairwise inter actions between their constituent atoms. Despite a few conceptual short comings, the method provides a fairly reliable practical means of handling, on a microscopic level, a wide range of problems that arise in the solid-state physics and chemistry of organic compounds. This monograph is an attempt to generalize the experience gained in the past twenty years in interpreting the static and dynamic properties of organic molecular solids in terms of atom-atom potentials. It embraces nearly all aspects of the application of the method, including an evaluation of cohesive energies, equilibrium crystal structures, phonon spectra, ther modynamic functions, and crystal defects. Many related topics such as the effect of the crystal field on molecular conformation, the determination of crystal structures from raw diffraction data, and the problem of polymor phic transitions are also discussed. We believe that this book will be of use to researchers in solid-state physics, chemistry, crystallography, physical chemistry, and polymer chem istry. It also gives us an opportunity to acknowledge our indebtedness to those who sent us published as well as unpublished information and sugges tions, including A.T. Amos, E.L. Bokhenkov, H. Bonadeo, R.K. Boyd, C.P.

For this edition (first in 1984), the editors have updated the collection of primary documents which tell the story of atomic energy in the US from the discovery of fission through the development of nuclear weapons, international proliferation, and attempts at control. The book also includes a new chapter, reflects on Chernoyl, Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

Volume is indexed by Thomson Reuters CPCI-S (WoS). Collection of selected, peer reviewed papers from the 2013 International Conference on Solar Energy Materials and Energy Engineering (SEMEE 2013), September 1-2, 2013, Hong Kong. The 81 papers are grouped as follows: Chapter 1: Chemical Engineering and Energy Materials; Chapter 2: Energy Science and Engineering; Chapter 3: Structural Engineering and Building; Chapter 4: Environmental Materials and Engineering; Chapter 5: Management and Planning of Energy.

Topology-based methods are of increasing importance in the analysis and visualization of datasets from a wide variety of scientific domains such as biology, physics, engineering, and medicine. Current challenges of topology-based techniques include the management of time-dependent data, the representation of large and complex datasets, the characterization of noise and uncertainty, the effective integration of numerical methods with robust combinatorial algorithms, etc. . The editors have brought together the most prominent and best recognized researchers in the field of topology-based data analysis and visualization for a joint discussion and scientific exchange of the latest results in the field. This book contains the best 20 peer-reviewed papers resulting from the discussions and presentations at the third workshop on "Topological Methods in Data Analysis and Visualization", held 2009 in Snowbird, Utah, US. The 2009 "TopoInVis" workshop follows the two successful workshops in 2005 (Slovakia) and 2007 (Germany).