J. Samuel Walker

The Organization of American Historians awarded the book the 2010 Richard W. Leopold Prize for historical work being done by historians outside academia.

He also authored a comprehensive review of the Three Mile Island accident, Three Mile Island: A Nuclear Crisis in Historical Perspective (2004). According to his own account, Walker's work debunked the "grievous misconstructions [which] were portrayals of the bubble issue that were central features of at least two books that came out shortly after the accident (in 1982) and in three television programs..." Walker disputed the alleged imminence of an explosion; a central point of his argument was that if the situation was as dangerous as previous writers contended, that Jimmy Carter would not have been permitted to visit the TMI power plant.

In The Road to Yucca Mountain, Walker covers the U.S. government's controversial attempts to address the engineering and social issues associated with high-level radioactive waste repository (HLRWR) management and spent reactor fuel (SRF). He starts with the Manhattan Project and works through the policy debate. In 1987, Yucca Mountain, Nevada emerged as the most likely candidate for a repository. He explicates the United States Atomic Energy Commission's flop with its first attempt to build a HLRWR in a Kansas salt mine. He addresses deep geological disposal and surface storage of HLRW and SRF as well as fuel reprocessing.

Walker was a history instructor at the University of Maryland in the mid-seventies but was hired by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) in June, 1979, working under the chief historian, George T. Mazuzan. Walker was able to write in a lucid manner applauded in popular science press.