Present at the Future: From Evolution to Nanotechnology, Candid and Controversial Conversations on Science and Nature

I recently read this and Ira Flatow's other book, "They All Laughed..." I have found both to be fun, interesting books filled with fascinating insight into the lives of important scientists and inventors - and with a great sense of fun. I mean, in this book, Ira debunks everything from the Bernoulli airplane myth, to why bubbles in Guiness float down instead of up along the glass. I highly recommend it, enjoy!

Pebble reactors, "each one of the cylindrical pebbles are packed with a load of radioactive fuel, a cue ball, containing inside, ten thousand tiny little micro spheres of uranium. They drop into the top of the a hopper and by gravity are circulated and discharge from the bottom and then pneumatically reinserted in the top and could be operated without refueling or shutting down for about five years." "The Chinese and the South Africans are in fact now in the process of licensing for construction two of these demonstration plants." The pebble reactor has no water; instead the coolant is helium and does not get activated or corrode material; the pebble reactor promises to be 50 percent efficient. The heated helium can be used to produce electricity or as a heat exchange. The pebble reactor may be used to produce hydrogen. The reactor does not have walls and the design is "Meltdown-proof" because the reactor design does not let the fuel get hot enough to melt. The reactor is designed to automatically shutdown without human intervention if the coolant fails. "Pebble reactors don't show any signs of being cheaper than the conventional reactors we have in the country." "The white house has been reluctant to spend money on developing these reactors, spending money instead on more conventional nuclear reactors." Two commercial reactors are scheduled to come online in 2011, 2012. PBMR process involves helium coolant entering the vector vessel at 500 C and a pressure of 9MPa or 1,323 pounds per square inch. The gas moves down between the hot fuel sphere, and leaves the vessel at 9090 C. The hot gas enters the tub urine and is connected to the generator and gas compressors. The coolant leaves the turbine at 500 C, recompressed, and returned to the reactor vessel. Joe Lucas, director of Americans for Balanced Energy Choices, says, "We have more energy in the form of coal here in the United States than the Middle East has in its entirety in oil." Lucas choice for energy is coal. "Sulfer dioxide, nitrogen oxide ... have been cut by about seventy percent overall". Coal is half the cost of other fuels. Half the electricity produced in the United States comes from coal. Lucas says the highest potential for coal as a energy source is power plants that emit no pollutants. The CO2 emitted from the coal power plant will be stored in underground aquifers. Integrated gasification combined cycle, IGCC can produce gas from coal. Jeff Goodwell says, "But the industry has resisted building these plants. They prefer to tout these plants that are ten to twenty years down the road and continue building the same thing." "The coal industry fought tooth and nail against all those laws that required reductions during the 70s and 80s and 90s, spending millions of dollars lobbying against them." Sequestration of CO2 underground will work. Coal power plants could store millions of tons of CO2 underground. The biggest sequestration field is in Ca

As I expected, this was a fun book to read. I did not any significant errors. The presentation was disjointed with no clear direction.

I'm a big fan of popular science books--new theories and advances pop up all the time, and it's hard to keep up with them otherwise. "Present at the Future" is definitely one of the better offerings out there, both in terms of the scope of the fields covered and in the clarity of its explanations. In fact, Flatow picks such interesting topics and discusses them so well that I often found myself wishing he's explanations had gone even more in-depth. The fact that he didn't is not a handicap however; the broad range of topics will expose readers to a lot of new potential interests they can then pursue further in other sources. My only quibble with the book is Flatow's alarming tendency to start a paragraph with a quote, write four or five sentences, and then recycle the exact same quote--which struck me as somewhat sloppy. Surely the experts he interviewed provided him with more than one usable soundbite. But honestly, it's a very small flaw in an otherwise excellent book.

As science writers goes Ira Flatow is pretty goods,. I may be prejudiced because my middle school ( Junior high ) science teacher was Ira Bradley. I've read a lot of Popular science in the 55 or so years since then. I can't give this guy a 5 star, but he's covering the issues. He's a reporter so we really can't expect him to have much of a sense of the mathematics or important equations involved, but he should read some of the great science writers of the 30's and 40's and get a sense of the history and it's importance. Talking about the future without mentioning Benoit Mandelbrot or Per Bak is pretty much leaving out the "big picture". He also left out Isaac Asimov who is probably the most prolific science writer of all time. Some of us may not be "present at the future", but we have a good idea where it is headed.