Energy
by Richard Rhodes · first published 2018
25% recommend75% neutral
"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,
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…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
on “Hackable humans and digital dictators: Q&A with Yuval Noah Harari” ↗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.
on “Ask HN: 2018 Summer Reading List?” ↗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…
on “Policy, not tech, spurred Danish dominance in wind energy” ↗…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…
on “The Big Lie About Nuclear Waste [video]” ↗Interesting thought. In Richard Rhodes new book Energy, he describes how an early iron smelting works in England, faced with temporarily low demand due to a recession, rolled its excess iron into railroad tracks which could be re-used for other purposes once…
on “Power Worth Less Than Zero Spreads as Green Energy Floods the Grid” ↗…a "synthesizer" of ideas and knowledge from many people and disparate branches of science. In my opinion he really came into his own, though, after the bomb, when he started formulating the US' atomic energy strategy, essentially inserting himself -- a scientist, not a statesman -- into the political elite by sheer force of will and charisma. Rhodes tells of Oppenheimer completely dominating meetings in early…
on “The Eccentric Father of the Atomic Bomb, J. Robert Oppenheimer (2019)” ↗Frequently Bought Together * This item: Uranium Ore by Images SI Inc. $39.95 * Uranium: War, Energy and the Rock That Shaped the World by Tom Zoellner Hardcover $10.78 * The Making of the Atomic Bomb by Richard Rhodes Paperback $14.28
on “Hgiyiyi: Amazon test page has 11 customer reviews” ↗…the sequel, Dark Sun: The Making Of The Hydrogen Bomb, goes into more detail, not just Oppenheimer's famous trial, but also his family life and his lesser-known political work in helping form the Atomic Energy Commission. [1] https://www.amazon.com/Making-Atomic-Bomb-Richard-Rhodes/dp/...
on “On Oppenheimer: A Conversation with Louisa Hall on Her Novel, “Trinity”” ↗…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'.
on “On Behalf of Environmentalists, I Apologize for the Climate Scare” ↗I'm reading Rhodes' "Energy". Now I know why Great Britain got so deforested: from heating all those drafty old castles.
on “Ask HN: Any interesting books you have read lately?” ↗