For our April meeting, we will be reading Midnight in Chernobyl to commemorate Earth Day.

Midnight in Chernobyl: The Untold Story of the World’s Greatest Nuclear Disaster
By Adam Higginbotham
Illustrated. 538 pages.

From the New York Times https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/06/books/review-midnight-chernobyl-adam-higginbotham.html:
"In his chilling new book, “Midnight in Chernobyl,” the journalist Adam Higginbotham shows how an almost fanatical compulsion for secrecy among the Soviet Union’s governing elite was part of what made the accident not just cataclysmic but so likely in the first place. Interviewing eyewitnesses and consulting declassified archives — an official record that was frustratingly meager when it came to certain details and, Higginbotham says, couldn’t always be trusted — he reconstructs the disaster from the ground up, recounting the prelude to it as well as its aftermath. The result is superb, enthralling and necessarily terrifying.

The accident also decimated international confidence in nuclear power, and a number of countries halted their own programs — for a time, that is. Global warming has made the awesome potential of the atom a source of hope again and, according to some advocates, an urgent necessity; besides, as Higginbotham points out, nuclear power, from a statistical standpoint, is safer than the competing alternatives, including wind."
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We you hope you will be able to join us even if you have not been able to read or finish the book. We are all familiar to varying degrees with the horrific, catastrophic Chernobyl nuclear accident and there is still plenty to discuss.