When I was 10, my family moved to Richland, Washington, next to the Hanford Nuclear Reservation. My father worked as a Bechtel engineer on the Fast Flux (Sodium) Test Facility. I started studying the nuclear power industry as an undergraduate. As a graduate student, I published my first paper on the operation of an international uranium cartel. Most of my research at Stanford University and the Nuclear Energy Agency of the OECD has focused on the economics of the nuclear power industry, including waste management. Since my retirement in 2018, I have worked with the (US) National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine on the cleanup of the mixed radioactive-hazardous waste at Hanford.
This is one of the best books ever written! It won a Pulitzer Prize in Nonfiction, the National Book, and the National Book Critics Circle Awards. It traces the history of nuclear weapons from the discovery of nuclear fission through the Manhattan Project.
This epic (i.e., very long!) work describes the science, people, and politics that led to the research, development, demonstration, and deployment of the first nuclear weapon. The book reads like an H.G. Wells novel, writing about the actors in this chronicle of the scientists who enhanced quantum theory and applied it to thermonuclear fission, including Bohr, Fermi, Lawrence, Oppenheimer, Planck, Szilard, Teller, and von Neumann: the characters in the Oppenheimer film. Even if you do not finish it, you must start it!
With a brand new introduction from the author, this is the complete story of how the bomb was developed. It is told in rich, human, political, and scientific detail, from the turn-of-the-century discovery of the vast energy locked inside the atom to the dropping of the first bombs on Japan. Few great discoveries have evolved so swiftly -- or have been so misunderstood. From the theoretical discussions of nuclear energy to the bright glare of Trinity there was a span of hardly more than twenty-five years. What began as merely an interesting speculative problem in physics grew into the Manhattan…
This book outlines the history of the nuclear power industry in the US from the Atomic Energy Act of 1946, less than one year after the denotations of the highly enriched uranium bomb over Hiroshima (6 August 1945) and the plutonium bomb over Nagasaki (9 August 1945) to 1968.
It describes the development of the Nuclear Steam Supply System and its supply chain, as well as the nuclear fuel cycle from uranium mining to the chemical separation of plutonium. Its objective is to determine whether there are any violations of American antitrust laws. It is full of naïve optimism, tables, and hand-drawn charts that give the reader a feeling of what American scientists and engineers believed the future would hold before the events of 1968.
This engaging book documents the diffusion of nuclear power from both technological and national perspectives. Its working hypothesis is that nuclear power is the result of both the development of nuclear weapons and the development of peaceful uses of the technology in generating electricity and producing medical radioisotopes. Because of this dual use, the authors believe that its development did not follow an economic logic.
Rather than explaining economic motivations, it analyzes the patterns of nuclear power diffusion from its origins to the emergence of advanced nuclear, so-called fourth-generation technologies and small modular reactors. There were disruptions in this diffusion: the accidents of Three Mile Island in 1979, Chernobyl in 1986, and Fukushima in 2011, which effectively ended the construction of new nuclear power plants outside of China and Russia.
I love this book’s comprehensive nature, but I do not agree with all of its assumptions. There is no other book that compares the costs of nuclear electricity generation with other generating methods, including coal and gas with and without carbon capture and storage, onshore and offshore wind, utility-scale and residential solar photovoltaics, concentrated solar power, hydro, biomass, geothermal, lithium batteries, and hydrogen fuel cells.
The costs of these technologies were provided by experts from 23 of the International Energy Agency (IEA) member countries, four members of the Nuclear Energy Agency who are not members of the IEA, and publicly available data for China and India. (There were nine editions published in 1981, 1984, 1989, 1992, 1998, 2005, 2010, 2015, and 2020; there should be a 10th edition in 2025).
I am captivated by the details in this book and refer to it again and again in my research because it discusses employment in many sectors of the nuclear power industry. After reviewing 19 studies of nuclear industry employment, it allocates the construction costs of a Pressurized Water Reactor known as the System 80+, the basis of the South Korean APR1400, to labor and other expenses following the North American Industrial Classification System (NAICS).
It aggregates these expenses into industries and then uses the US Bureau of Census labor cost data to determine how many employees are directly supported by the labor expenses in each industry. Further, it discusses how different macroeconomic (input-output and computable general equilibrium) models forecast indirect and induced employment in a nation’s economy as a whole.
This book is a unique introduction to the economics and economic uncertainties of nuclear electricity generation. It examines nuclear power’s complex relationships among financial, operational, and regulatory cost drivers. It does so as a research monograph and as a textbook by modeling and explaining one of the world’s most opaque technologies using microeconomics, statistics, and cost engineering.
The Economics of Future Nuclear Power (published as Economics of Nuclear Power by Routledge) compares nuclear power electricity generation with the economics and uncertainties of carbon-based generators, natural gas, and coal. With almost 100 tables and figures and an equation variable index, this book details nuclear electricity production from an international perspective. It also includes an overview of the past 70 years of global nuclear power developments.
