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BOOK REVIEW: Writing Well Is The Wronged Wife's Revenge In 'See Now Then' Feb. 5, 2013

Black and Klemski quickly learned to get over any scruples about wearing trousers to work. "You'd be climbing all over these pipes, and testing the welds in them," Black says, so skirts were impractical. "Then they had a mass spectrometer there, and you had to watch the dials go off, and you weren't supposed to say that word either. And the crazy thing is, I didn't ask. I mean, I didn't know where those pipes were going, I didn't know what was going through them ... I just knew that I had to find the leak and mark it."

She never asked what was in the pipes, "because they told me not to," Black says. "I'd come from a Catholic school where I minded the nuns, and from a family, did what my parents told me ... so then I did what the boss told me!"

Klemski and Black say the secrecy surrounding Oak Ridge didn't make them nervous. "But see, we didn't have all these things that you all have now," Black says. "We didn't have cell phones, we didn't have TVs. If we wanted to know the news, we went to the movies and we watched the newsreel, so it didn't bother me ... and if somebody was to ask you, 'what are you making out there in Oak Ridge,' you'd say '79 cents an hour,'" she laughs.

They only learned that they'd been processing uranium when the news of the Hiroshima bombing broke. "That was the first we heard," Klemski says. "At that time, the Knoxville News-Sentinel came out and it was five cents a copy, but that day, when the bomb was dropped, it was a dollar," Black adds.

"At first, we were really excited," she continues. "We thought, oh, we've done something to help win the war. It wasn't till after we saw the devastation — you know, we didn't like that, but we were glad that we had a part in bringing the war to an end." Klemski chimes in: "I certainly was happy that I was here, and that I was part of the war effort too."

That was the overriding sentiment at Oak Ridge, says author Kiernan. "This world that they were in, the world of early 1945, was not a world that knew what nuclear winter was, it was not a world that knew what a fallout shelter was," she says. "All they knew was the war, and the day the bomb dropped, all they knew was, this new superbomb has dropped, and it looks like the tide is turning for us."

"I was really upset, you know, about all the devastation, but there was nothing I could do about it," Klemski says. "They asked us to stay on, and they were going to do research on, you know, something to see if they could help do something for peacetime," Black adds. "And we thought that would be the end of all wars."

Read an excerpt of The Girls of Atomic City

Kenyans go to the polls to pick a new president Monday. The last election, in 2007, was followed by weeks of tribal violence in some cases orchestrated by politicians themselves. This time around, one of the presidential candidates is accused of war crimes and many are accused of land grabbing and corruption.

The XYZ Show, Kenya's version of The Daily Show, is making it all a laughing matter. The TV show uses puppets to poke relentless fun of Kenyan politicians. While fueled by the public's frustration, the show is also an example of the free speech the citizens have not always had.

In the mock XYZ Show presidential debate in February, which aired the night before the real presidential debate in Kenya, the puppet moderator asked pointed factual questions. The moderator prods the character of presidential candidate Raila Odinga about the doubling of interest rates during his time as prime minister.

But the puppet politicians never answer the questions asked. They just give speeches.

"I think you should not ask what Raila has done as prime minister of this country," the Odinga puppet replies. "But rather ask yourself what you will do for Raila when he becomes the president of this republic!"

Jon Stewart once described the writers' room at The Daily Show as "a gathering of curmudgeons expressing frustration and upset."

In the writers' room of The XYZ Show, there is a lot more frustration than humor. The week of the presidential debate, producer Julian Macharia spent a few minutes ripping the real event.

"The questions from the public, for pete's sake, 'What will you do for our teachers?' I felt like saying, what? How about ask, 'What happened to the last three promises?' " he says.

Head writer Lily Wanjiku says the greed is "out of control."

Environmentalists have a hope.

If they can block the Keystone XL pipeline, they can keep Canada from developing more of its dirty tar sands oil. It takes a lot of energy to get it out of the ground and turn it into gasoline, so it has a bigger greenhouse gas footprint than conventional oil.

But the State Department report, which was released Friday, says Keystone won't have much of an impact on the development of that oil from Alberta, Canada.

Industry analyst Kevin Book of ClearView Energy Partners says that finding will make it easier for the Obama administration to say the project wouldn't affect climate change.

"The State Department said, 'We agree with industry.' They're saying this oil would have gone to market anyway," Book says. "The facts are the oil in the ground in Canada isn't going to stay there if there's a buyer. And there is a buyer. The buyer's here in the U.S., right now, and the oil is coming here by train, by truck and in some cases by barge."

It's also already flowing to the U.S. through existing pipelines.

Industry experts do say in the short-term, Keystone could get oil flowing faster.

Canadian investment researcher Chris Damas says the industry wants to increase production dramatically. And it's hard to see how trains could keep up, especially since there's already a big backlog for new tanker cars.

"Unless you can find a pipeline that can cross the border without presidential approval, I think that the Canadians ... and I'm a proud Canadian, we have a problem," Damas says. "We have landlocked oil, so there's no easy fix to this problem."

Already, transportation constraints have driven down the price of Canadian oil.

Damas says, if that continues, producing this oil just won't be profitable any more.

"If the price goes too low, these projects will slow down," he says.

Michael Brune, executive director of the Sierra Club, fears the State Department's analysis will push the Obama administration to OK the project.

"This makes the president's job to follow through on his commitment to be tough on climate change, it makes that job much more difficult," Brune says.

Of course, the impact on climate isn't the only thing the Obama administration will consider. While the pipeline is being built, it will support 42,000 jobs bringing $2 billion in wages.

But Brune says it's not over yet.

"We are going to fight," Brune says. "We will use all of the resources that the Sierra Club has to offer. Our law department, our organizers, our lobbyists, the 2.1 million members and supporters across the country, 170 groups who joined together at the climate rally in Washington, D.C., to make sure that the pipeline is rejected and that we go all-in on clean energy instead."

University of California, Davis, energy expert Amy Myers Jaffe says the only way to keep the oil from Canada under the ground is to change the way we live.

"Really, truly, it's a lifestyle issue. We use 18 to 19 million barrels a day of oil in this country," Jaffe says.

That's more than 20 percent of oil consumed in the whole world.

"We're only 5 percent of the population," Jaffe says. "And we need to look in the mirror."

Jaffe says once we reduce our consumption, we can have the luxury of rejecting Canada's oil.