Sustainable Energy: Choosing Among Options [Book Review]

This book was written by five professors at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology as the textbook for a course of the same name. The early chapters provide tools for measuring the sustainability, usefulness, and economics of different energy-generating methods. The guts of the book are the eight chapters on specific technologies: fossil fuels; nuclear power; biomass; geothermal; hydro-power; solar; tidal; and wind sources. The parallel formats of each section make comparisons easy. The last third of the book covers both an array of energy issues other than pure generation as well as further efforts to provide context and tools for evaluating information. The text covers an astonishingly broad range of topics. Despite not having fuller coverage of some topics, the depth brought to many subjects is impressive. The book is an excellent reference tool.