| 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] {advert} / £16.10
[amazon.co.uk] {advert}  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."
—
“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 The New Village Green: Living Light, Living Local, Living Large, edited by Stephen Morris]
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] {advert} / £17.09
[amazon.co.uk] {advert}  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.” | 
