Books like Megawatts and Megatons — picked by fans

Putting in the numbers is what Gates does in his book. Climate change is real, no question. How to address it is where the controversy comes in. I really like that from the outset, Gates proposes five questions to consider whenever climate change is discussed: what fraction of the annual carbon dioxide emission are you removing? What’s your plan for cement? How much electrical power will be needed, what’s the cost, and how much space will it take up? 

But he’s optimistic that zero emissions can be reached. He argues there are many options to explore, including nuclear, and says, contrary to much of the news reporting, don’t focus on 2030; focus instead on 2050 to give the best solutions time to emerge.

My understanding of how the world works has been greatly influenced by my study of economics. However, economists often make overly optimistic assumptions about technology and resources that are not grounded in fact and experience.

Smil's book on how the world really works is a powerful antidote to the wishful thinking of those, not just economists, who believe that technology will solve the problems of overshoot, poverty, inequality, conflict, and whatever else may be ailing us.

I love Smil's grasp of physical, biological, and technological fundamentals and his ability to communicate his wisdom about how the world really works simply and with conviction.   

The numbers in physics have always fascinated me. Many think of physics as full of impenetrable equations. Some, like E=mc squared and F=ma, are associated with famous names, Einstein and Newton. But on their own, equations don’t tell us what’s happening. Numbers breathe life into equations, giving meaning to the symbols. In Rees’s beautiful book, he identifies six numbers that have led to the universe around us and to the extraordinary complexity of the world we live in. 

And they are just numbers, like 3 or 0.007. Only six numbers? So few seem astonishing. Modern physics and cosmology do identify others. But in all cases, the conclusion is that you can’t change them, not even a little, and still end up with a universe and world like ours. 

I can’t say I love this book since I don’t agree with his premise: wind, water, and solar can do it all. But to be fair, he’s right that cleaning up the air by removing coal plants would be a boon to global health everywhere. 

He makes an appealing case. But his vision of the future founders for me on the intermittency issue of his power sources, particularly wind and solar. How will they scale to match the needs? Where is the battery technology to support the downtime? What are the environmental impacts? How will the power get from producer to user? He is opposed to nuclear power and yet it is the closest thing to a plug-to-plug replacement for the coal fired plants we all agree should be phased out.

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! 

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.

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.

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.

I’m always impressed by writers who are able to dream up an original plot, and then make that plot come alive on the page.

The book tells the story of three generations of Russian women in the second half of the twentieth century. It’s a very unusual blend of Sci-fi, geopolitical history, time travel, and moral dilemmas. A tall order, but the book succeeds in weaving together these narrative strands in a way that feels natural and effortless, while evoking questions about our complex relationship with the notion of scientific progress.

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).