I’m curious about the scalability of this method, but it’s a bit outside my experience. Seems like it would take a lot of energy to implement?

It’s not clear that this affected the decision to drop the bombs let alone the sole reasoning. Frankly, there was little justifiable strategic argument for use of them at that point in the war aside from as a form of intimidation against the Soviet Union. More likely the US would have dropped the bombs regardless and it was used as a justification after the fact: “the Japanese were barbaric, so this justifies our barbarism!”

They usually don’t know about institutional indirect costs and how they often run around 50% of the research funding in the US.

For those not in the know, that’s an extra 50% that you need to add to the funds you apply for that will just go to the college to use for whatever they want. Research groups often don’t see any of this invested back into their facilities and grad students often need to apply for their own external funding to make a high enough wage just to scrape by.