Physics 80

Paper on Owen

Term Paper Guidelines • Term Papers from Past Years

A number of resources available to students in the course, but not generally on the net, may be found at http://saeta.physics.hmc.edu/courses/p80/papers/ Some further papers are posted on the page Papers accessible to students.

See Strategies for finding reputable references for ideas on finding useful sources.

Papers and books in the public domain

• Winning the Oil Endgame — many practical suggestions for increasing energy efficiency and decreasing our reliance on fossil fuels, by Amory Lovins and the Rocky Mountain Institute. For a fun teaser, head to this 2005 talk by Amory Lovins
• Without the Hot Air — a book which analyzes, using basic calculations, the energy requirement of the world and the practicality of various sources of energy.

Government

California

• Senate Bill 97 (2007) — requiring consideration of the impact of projects on green house gases and climate change
• Senate Bill 375 (2008) — sustainable communities and regional goals

Useful websites

• Claremont
  • http://sustainability.claremont.edu/solar/
• Climate

• http://www.ipcc.ch/ — The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change
• Intelligence Squared debate on the proposition “Global Warming is not a Crisis”
• Engineering a Cooler Earth (2010 June 5)

• Efficiency
  • http://aceee.org/ — The American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy
  • Seven steps to designing a zero-energy home
  • A Graph is Worth a Thousand Gigawatt-Hours – How California Came to Lead the United States in Energy Efficiency, Arthur H. Rosenfeld and Deborah Poskanzer (2009)
• Energy of all stripes
  • http://www.iea.org/ — The International Energy Agency
  • http://www.nrel.gov/ — The National Renewable Energy Laboratory
  • http://www.eia.doe.gov/ — The United States Energy Information Administration.
  • http://www.eia.doe.gov/aer/contents.html — Annual Energy Review (AER), a treasure trove of data about U.S. energy production and consumption, provided by the US EIA.
  • http://www.energy.gov/ — The United States Department of Energy website
  • http://www.eere.energy.gov/ — Energy Efficiency & Renewable Energy, part of the Department of Energy website
  • http://eetd.lbl.gov/ — Environmental Energy Technologies Division of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
• Environment
  • http://www.ipcc.ch/ — The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change
  • http://www.epa.gov/ — The United States Environmental Protection Agency
  • http://www.nrc.gov/ — The United States Nuclear Regulatory Commission

• http://www.ucsusa.org/ — Union of Concerned Scientists, was founded in 1969 by faculty members and students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who were concerned about the misuse of science and technology in society. Their statement called for the redirection of scientific research to pressing environmental and social problems. Sign up for UCS action alerts and start targeting your governmental representatives
• http://www.wri.org/ — World Resources Institute
• The National Academies — lots of studies of the National Research Council, available for free download in PDF format
• The World Watch Institute
• Reports of SCOPE — which is the Scientific Committee on Problems of the Environment
• http://californiawatch.org/dailyreport/us-gas-artificially-cheap-what-we-dont-pay-pump-10692

• Geothermal
  • Geothermal (Ground-Source) Heat Pumps — Report from Oak Ridge National Laboratory, December, 2008. (source)
• Nuclear

• http://www.nrc.gov/ — The United States Nuclear Regulatory Commission
• NEA Study (2009) — Brief position paper of the Nuclear Energy Agency on the outlook for nuclear power and its impact on climate change (Source: http://www.nea.fr/html/general/press/in-perspective/addressing-climate-change.pdf)
• APS Study (2007) — Consolidated Interim Storage of Commercial Spent Nuclear Fuel: A Technical and Programmatic Assessment
• APS Study (2005) — Nuclear Power and Proliferation Resistance: Securing Benefits, Limiting Risks
• It Could Happen Here