The uranium craze that hit America in the 1950s was surely one of history’s strangest fads. Jars of make-up lined with uranium ore were sold as “Revigorette” and advertised as infusing “beautifying radioactivity [into] every face cream”. A cosmetics firm applied radioactive soil to volunteers’ skin and used Geiger counters to check whether its soap could wash it away. Most astonishing of all, a uranium mine in the US state of Montana developed a sideline as a health spa, inviting visitors to inhale “a constant supply of radon gas” for the then-substantial sum of $10.

The story of this craze, and much else besides, is entertainingly told in Lucy Jane Santos’ new book Chain Reactions: a Hopeful History of Uranium. Santos is an expert in the history of 20th-century leisure, health and beauty rather than physics, but she is nevertheless well-acquainted with radioactive materials. Her previous book, Half Lives, focused on radium, which had an equally jaw-dropping consumer heyday earlier in the 20th century.

The shift to uranium gives Santos the license to explore several new topics. For physicists, the most interesting of these is nuclear power. Before we get there, though, we must first pass through uranium’s story from prehistoric times up to the end of the Second World War. From the uranium-bearing silver mines of medieval Jachymóv, Czechia, to the uranium enrichment facilities founded in Oak Ridge, Tennessee as part of the Manhattan Project, Santos tells this story in a breezy, anecdote-driven style. The fact that many of her chosen anecdotes also appear in other books on the histories of quantum mechanics, nuclear power or atomic weapons is hardly her fault. This is well-trodden territory for historians and publishers alike, and there are only so many quirky stories to go around.

The most novel factor that Santos brings to this crowded party is her regular references to people whose role in uranium’s history is often neglected. This includes not only female scientists like Lise Meitner (co-discoverer of nuclear fission) and Leona Woods (maker of the boron trifluoride counter used in the first nuclear-reactor experiment), but also the “Calutron Girls”, who put in 10-hour shifts six days a week at the Oak Ridge plant and were not allowed to know that they were enriching uranium for the first atomic bomb. Other “hidden figures” include the Allied prisoners who worked the Jachymóv mines for the Nazis; the political “undesirables” who replaced them after the Soviets took over; and the African labourers who, though legally free, experienced harsh conditions while mining uranium ore at Shinkolobwe (now in the Democratic Republic of the Congo) for the Belgians and, later, the Americans.

Most welcome of all, though, are the book’s references to the roles of Indigenous peoples. When Robert Oppenheimer’s Manhattan Project needed a facility for transmuting uranium into plutonium, Santos notes that members of the Wanapum Nation in eastern Washington state were given “a mere 90 days to pack up and abandon their homes…mostly with little compensation”. The 167 residents of Bikini island in the Pacific were even less fortunate, being “temporarily” relocated before the US Army tested an atomic bomb on their piece of paradise. Santos quotes the American comedian Bob Hope – nobody’s idea of a woke radical – in summing up the result of this callous act: “As soon as the war ended, we located the one spot on Earth that hadn’t been touched by war and blew it to hell.”

The most novel factor that Santos brings to this crowded party is her regular references to people whose role in uranium’s history is often neglected

These injustices, together with the radiation-linked illnesses experienced by the (chiefly Native American) residents of the Trinity and Nevada test sites, are not the focus of Chain Reactions. It could hardly be “a hopeful history” if they were. But while mentioning them is a low bar, it’s a low bar that the three-hour-long Oscar-winning biopic Oppenheimer didn’t manage to clear. If Santos can do it in a book not even 300 pages long, no-one else has any excuse.

Chain Reactions is not a science-focused book, and in places it feels a little thin. For example, while Santos correctly notes that the “gun” design of the first uranium bomb wouldn’t work for a plutonium weapon, she doesn’t say why. Later, she states that “making a nuclear reactor safe enough and small enough for use in a car proved impossible”, but she leaves out the scientific and engineering reasons for this. The book’s most eyebrow-raising scientific statement, though, is that “nuclear is one of the safest forms of electricity produced – only beaten by solar”. This claim is neither explained nor footnoted, and it left me wondering, first, what “safest” means in this context, and second what makes wind, geothermal and tidal electricity less “safe” than nuclear or solar?

Despite this, there is much to enjoy in Santos’ breezy and – yes – hopeful history. Although she is blunt when discussing the risks of nuclear energy, she also points out that when countries stop using it, they mostly replace nuclear power plants with fossil-fuel ones. This, she argues, is little short of disastrous. Quite apart from the climate impact, ash from coal-fired power plants carries radiation from uranium and thorium into the environment “at a much larger rate than any from a nuclear power plant”. Thus, while the 2011 meltdown of Japan’s Fukushima reactors killed no-one directly, Japan and Germany’s subsequent phase-out of nuclear power contributed to an estimated 28,000 deaths from air pollution. Might a revival of nuclear power be better? Santos certainly thinks so, and she concludes her book with a slogan that will have many physicists nodding along: “Nuclear power? Yes please.”

• 2024 Icon Books 288pp £20hb