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The
nuclear energy option
by Bernard L. Cohen [1924 - ] 
1990, Plenum Publishing Corporation, 0306435675
 This
book is out of print. However, it is freely available at the University
of Pittsburgh website.
Secondhand printed copies may be available from amazon.com
and amazon.co.uk.
The nuclear energy option is a brilliant summary of risk,
particularly in the context of the nuclear industry. I am hard pressed
to see how anyone can be adequately briefed on the nuclear industry,
and energy in general, without reading this book.
It is a great shame that this book is out of print, but fortunately
it is available on the net. Long may it remain so.
This book is so good that, instead of the usual publisher’s and
mates’ kind remarks, it is recommended by a whole list of top
names in nuclear physics. This is not just another shallow piece cobbled
together by a journalist, but is written by a serious expert in the
field.
I do not know whether there is any useful substitute for this book,
but that hardly matters if you read The nuclear energy option.
This because, not only will the facts tend not to change much over short
periods of time, but this book also is written with great clarity and
good organisation.
Excerpt
from Chapter 13, for your amusement :
“In response, I offered to inhale publicly many times as much
plutonium as he said was lethal. At the same time, I made several
other offers for inhaling or eating plutonium - including to inhale
1,000 particles of plutonium of any size that can be suspended in
air, in response to "a single particle . . . will cause cancer,
" or to eat as much plutonium as any prominent nuclear critic
will eat or drink caffeine. My offers were such as to give me a risk
equivalent to that faced by an American soldier in World War II, according
to my calculations of plutonium toxicity which followed all generally
accepted procedures. These offers were made to all three major TV
networks, requesting a few minutes to explain why I was doing it.
I feel that I am engaged in a battle for my country's future, and
hence should be willing to take as much risk as other soldiers.”
—
“It is 5,000 times more dangerous to inhale plutonium than to
eat it, and eating plutonium is about equal in danger to eating the
same quantity of caffeine [...] ”
Of course, plutonium is vastly more radio-active
the uranium.
Solar
revolution: the economic transformation of the global energy industry
by Travis Bradford 
2006, The MIT Press, 026202604X or 978-0262026048, hbk
$16.47
[amazon.com] / £16.10
[amazon.co.uk]
 Solar
Revolution is a very interesting book, especially on the costing
of photovoltaic systems.
A 2006 publication, with about two hundred pages of substantive text,
its first eighty-eight pages are mostly a mediocre review of how we
arrived here. This area is very much better covered in Beyond
oil and gas: The Methanol Economy, reviewed below. The rest
of the book is far more useful, particularly as an analysis of how electricity
supply systems may be costed. The second half argues that PV is rapidly
becoming competitive with main-line generation and will steadily displace
it.
The thesis of the author is that the future lies in distributed
energy systems, which will steadily displace centralised provision
(large power stations) in a very few decades. My impression is that
he is rather overconfident on this point, but this does not detract
from the usefulness of the book on costing issues.
Solar Revolution was written before some recent claims
of considerable
improvements in PV technology.
From p.155 [note: PV = photovoltaic]
“[...] People and organisations that share these values comprise
a group of early PV technology adopters that are currently installing
PV systems on their locations, including many retail and consumer-product
organizations in the United States, such as Whole Foods, Wal-Mart,
Coca-Cola, and Frito Lay.”
—
“ [...] in 2005, three of the world's largest lenders - Citigroup,
Bank of America and JP Morgan/Chase - instituted environmental reviews
of loans on industrial products that were designed to determine the
effects these projects have in terms of greenhouse gas emissions and
other environmental pollutants. These new loan-review policies reflect
a growing awareness by lenders that corporate clients that do not
adequately consider the potential effects of future environmental
legislation and market trends risk a loss of competitiveness and credit
worthiness compared to companies that do.”
other
reviews on this book - yet again yak herders lead the world
Review
“During the last decade (as Janet Sawin of the Worldwatch Institute
has previously described), Japan has heavily subsidized the purchase
of rooftop solar panels by home owners. The Japanese authorities began
to do this, in part, because they wanted to meet the promises they
made on their own soil at the Kyoto conference on global warming,
but also, Bradford suggests, because they sensed that the industry
could grow if it were encouraged by an initial investment. Within
a few years, the subsidy had the desired effect - the volume of demand
made both manufacturing and installation much more efficient, driving
down the price. Today, the government subsidy has almost entirely
disappeared, but demand continues to rise, for the panels now allow
homeowners to produce their own power for the same price charged by
the country's big utilities. Japan in some ways is a special case
- blessed with few domestic energy sources, it has some of the world's
most expensive electricity, making solar panels more competitive.
On the other hand, it's not particularly sunny in Japan. In any event,
Bradford says the Japanese demand for solar power (and now an equally
large program in Germany) will be enough to drive the cost of producing
solar panels steadily down. Even without huge technological breakthroughs,
which he says are tantalizingly near, the current hardware can be
made steadily cheaper. He predicts the industry will grow 20 to 30
percent annually for the next forty years, which is akin to what happened
with the last silicon-based revolution, the computer chip. No surprise,
too, about who will own that industry - almost all the solar panel
plants are now in Japan and Germany.
Review
“You can see signs of this change already. When I was in Tibet
this summer, I repeatedly stumbled across the yak-skin tents of nomadic
herders living in some of the most remote (and lofty) valleys in the
world. They depended on yak dung, which they burned to cook food and
heat their tents, and also often on a small solar panel hanging off
one side of the tent, powering a lightbulb and perhaps a radio inside.
Every small town had a shop selling solar panels for a price roughly
equivalent to that of a single sheep...”[Quoted from nybooks.com]
Beyond
Oil and Gas: The Methanol Economy
by George A. Olah, Alain Goeppert, and G. K.
Surya Prakash
Wiley-VCH, 2006, hbk, 3527312757,
$32.50
[amazon.com] / £17.09
[amazon.co.uk]
 This
book tackles the problems of storage better than any
other source I know.
A methanol economy is very close
to the optimum procedure for a viable energy future,
which I have come to believe in from my own studies,
but with less confidence from within my much lesser
knowledge of chemistry [1].
Refer to Replacing
fossil fuels—the scale of the problem and
Replacements
for fossil fuels—what can be done about it?
This book has a excellent historical
review of the fossil fuel economy, together with a comprehensive
summary of the various routes to replacing the present
fossil fuel economy with a methanol-carrier economy.
The book is slapdash on nuclear power.
from
another review: a relevant and rational book on the
energy problems - about time
“Any serious energy policy must deal with three
critical issues.”
First, economic: The policy must provide an energy
resource base sufficient to allow for continued worldwide
economic growth for the foreseeable future.”
Second, environmental: The policy must be compatible
with the long-term flourishing of life on Earth, including
human life and civilization.”
And finally, strategic: The policy must ensure that
control of the Earth's energy resources, and thus
its future, lies in the hands of free societies committed
to human progress, and taken away from tyrannical
and terrorism-promoting states.”
George Olah, recipient of the 1994 Nobel Prize in
Chemistry, is one of the giants of twentieth-century
science, and his coauthors are solid technical men.
Together they have written a profoundly important
book on energy policy, laying out the basis for a
technically achievable approach to all three dimensions
of the energy problem.”
There is no shortage of energy experts with grand
designs and proposals - from technophile dreams of
an unworkable "hydrogen economy," to Malthusian calls
for enforced economic limits through conservation,
to socialist schemes for creating massive government-subsidized
synthetic-fuel industries, to the libertarian faith
in the Invisible Hand. Compared to such misguided
alternatives, the competence and rationality of The
Methanol Economy is refreshing.”
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