Name: Energy
ISBN: 9781501105357

Energy

"Pulitzer Prize- and National Book Award-winning author Richard Rhodes reveals the fascinating history behind energy transitions over time--wood to coal to oil to electricity and beyond. People have lived and died, businesses have prospered and failed, and nations have risen to world power and declined, all over energy challenges. Ultimately, the history of these challenges tells the story of humanity itself.... Human beings have confronted the problem of how to draw life from raw material since the beginning of time. Each invention, each discovery, each adaptation brought further challenges, and through such transformations, we arrived at where we are today. In Rhodes's singular style, Energy details how this knowledge of our history can inform our way tomorrow."--Amazon.

What Hacker News says

wombatmobileNov 2020

That's a great article, thanks for linking to it. Energy can explain so much about human endeavours in so few words.

I've read quite a lot of history, but Richard Rhodes' book Energy, A Human History, gave me a perspective unlike any other.

Who would have thought that the laws of thermodynamics would be so important a mechanism for social science? Well, I suppose physicists might, but social scientists usually not.

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rorykoehlerAug 2018

Thanks for the recommendation. Im cautiously optimistic tbh but this summer in Europe didn't look great. 3 years ago in Indonesia was a disaster of biblical proportions and i guarantee you must people don't even know about it.

I read another book recently that was quite indirectly enlightening on the subject. Energy by Richard Rhodes

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rorykoehlerJul 2018

I'm reading "Energy: A Human History" by Richard Rhodes currently. It is an engaging read about the last 400 years of energy production, consumption and technology.

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randcrawAug 2023

I'm reading Rhodes' "Energy". Now I know why Great Britain got so deforested: from heating all those drafty old castles.

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credit_guyJun 2023

> Pump the brakes on a "Chernobyl" comparison here. No NRC reactor would ever get to that - part of the reason it takes so long to approve.

I guess we are saying the same thing, aren't we? We have the NRC, and the NRC is conservative in giving approvals, precisely because we don't want a Chernobyl. I'm happy about that, and I do think the NRC is doing a good job, so a Chernobyl in the US is extraordianarily unlikely. But if we didn't have an NRC, then we'd have a Chernobyl in due time. Why are you saying "pump the brakes on a Chernobyl comparison"?

> The technology discussed here was invented by the US in 60s. None of this is new. The US pioneered reprocessing, separation and everything.

All this was before Three Miles Island, Chernobyl and Fukushima. The technology exists and it may even be used in a research setting, but without the NRC approval it is as good as nonexistent for civilian reactors.

> USA HAS NO PATH for dispositioning all this fuel.

That's not because of any technical difficulty. The US is disposing of military nuclear waste at the WIPP facility [1]. I just read in the book "Energy" by Richard Rhodes that the US could dispose of all the spent fuel it can burn in a thousand years at the same place. It's not a technical problem, it's a political problem. If it's a problem that is personally bothering you, you should write to your representative. I am personally not that worried about storing the spent fuel on site. It is not a huge amount.

Plus, in a hundred years, if we make progress with the nuclear technology, then it might become easy-peasy to reprocess spent fuel, and do what the Oklo guys are saying. I don't think we are quite there yet, and we won't be for 20 years, but I think it's entirely possible to get there in 50 years or 100 years. Why bury what something that holds the energy of hundreds of billions of tons of coal?

[1] https://www.energy.gov/em/waste-isolation-pilot-plant-wipp

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wilburTheDogJun 2020

It appears the author wants to convince us of his credentials as a progressive and then use any good will that generates to try and persuade us that environmentally progressive ideas are wrong. He claims we have been 'badly misinformed' by people with 'unsavory or unhealthy motivations'. But this synopsis of his book makes it look like it could have been written by a coalition of lobbyists from the meat and nuclear industries. Who are we to trust?

Also I think it's interesting that the only positive review he includes is from Richard Rhodes. I have never read anything from Richard Rhodes, but the second amazon review of his book Energy: A Human History has this to say 'the author is highly skeptical about renewable sources like wind and solar, waxing instead about the lost promise of nuclear'.

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