FUSION POWER: The Best Way to Generate Electricity i. Intro ii. So many ways to generate electricity. 1.

Well, old coal! 2. Solar Power 3. Tidal Power 4. Wave Power 5. River Power 6. "Solar Chimneys" 7. Wind Power 8. Biomass Power 9. "Traditional" Nuclear Power iii. A new way---fusion power? 1. Fusing atom nuclei 2. Hotter than the Sun 3. Tokamaks and Magnetic Confinement 4. Inertial Confinement 5. How do we really get electricity from that? iv. Why is fusion power so good? 1. Fusion fuel is everywhere! 2. Its so efficient! 3. Its so safe! 4. Really clean! v. Conclusion III: Credit to resources ----------------------------------------

So many ways to generate electricity! Nowadays, pressed by environmental and economical reasons, people have invented too many ways to generate electricity. We must pick one out for the future of electric generation. Coal Power Most of the electricity we use today comes from coal. Burning coal produces a lot of carbon monoxide, carbon dioxide, sulfur trioxide, and sulfur dioxide. Carbon monoxide is a poison to humans, carbon dioxide contributes to the greenhouse effect, and sulfur trioxide and sulfur dioxide make acid rain. We must find better ways to generate electricity. Solar Power One of the most popular candidates for future electricity generation is solar power. The sun is unlimited. However the initial cost of solar panels is so great and the lifetime is so short that it is not economically efficient. As a result, creating a big factory using solar power isnt practical. To use solar power you have to install it on your house. Also, solar panels dont work at night. To provide 24-hour long power, we just cant use solar. Tidal Power When on the topic of environmentally friendly power, one could not keep from discussing tidal power. Tides are very powerful and are a potential main energy source, but it isnt so easy to snatch that power from nature. To create a tidal power station, a dam must be created blocking a river-mouth, and tides rushing into the river will turn turbines and generate electricity. This type of dam dams up a lot of sand and silt behind the turbines, making water flow in too small an amount, which in turn can create floods. Fish migrating up the river also are blocked by the huge dam. Imagine a salmon trying to go up the river to lay eggs. Uh-oh! Huge dam ahead! The salmon cannot reproduce! Then all of the fish die. Wave Power Getting the big waves all for us! That sounds like a tempting thing to do! Many scientists are designing models for turning waves into electrical power. Wave power is a piece of hi-tech, but there are a few disadvantages. Big waves cant be found anywhere, and wave power generators are very expensive compared to their lifetime. They are also unreliable since waves are not powerful 24/7. River Power (old hydroelectric power) This is OLD POWER. Though many people talk about hydroelectric power

as a great new source of power, it isnt. Hydroelectric power is just damming up a river and using the flow of the water to generate electricity. It heavily damages the scenery. Look at the picture. See how much the river rose! Many centuries-old famous monuments were destroyed by a dam (this is the Three Gorges dam). When the land upstream is flooded, many people have to move out. Hydroelectric power isnt good at all! Solar Chimneys Back to the sun! Well, in order to avoid the high cost of solar panels, scientists are also researching on a new type of solar energy: solar chimneys. It is simply a chimney mounted upon a greenhouse. The greenhouse gets hot, and then hot air rises to the chimney, which has turbines that turn and generate electricity. This method does not generate electricity very efficiently because greenhouses do not get really hot. The weather is not sunny the whole year either. Solar chimneys are simply experiments. Wind Power Wind! Whooooooosh! When there is a big wind, we can all feel its power. Thats the reason why from ancient times people run windmills. Now we need a lot more power, and we can use wind turbines. Wind blows on the turbines, turning them and generating electricity with a generator. Though it might seem a great idea, it has a huge disadvantage: hitting birds. In the countryside where most wind farms are built, sparrows, swallows, and other kinds of small birds thrive. They like to fly in wide spaces, so they are likely harmed by wind turbines. Another disadvantage is that it produces tons of noise. Imagine living by a hundred of idling cars. That would be the equivalent of a wind farm. Do you like wind farms? Biomass/Trash Power It is the harvesting season. Farmer X was storing up wheat. Hey! he said to her wife, Whatll we do with all that ol wheat? Get it to that factory oer there and turn it into fuel! Ye know, cars run on us! Mrs. X replied. Will this be the future of farming? Will wheat be turned into fuel? These are all questions about biomass power. Biomass power is the conversion of biomass, like crops and trash, to gasoline or coal, and then burning the fuel produced. There are three disadvantages, though. First of all, burning fuel made from biomass produces exactly as much pollution as burning normal coal and gasoline.

Secondly, turning biomass into fuel uses toxic chemicals that are extremely dangerous. Biomass isnt so environmentally friendly after all! Fission (traditional nuclear) Power BOOOOOM!!! The first test bomb of the Manhattan Project exploded! It is simply natural to try to confine this immense power in a power station. We have now succeeded in making fission power stations. Fission relies on breaking up a 235 U atom with a neutron. This makes more neutrons, and those neutrons fly on to break up even more atoms. This process creates a lot of energy. However, this reaction is hard to control, so any failure will result in a huge explosion and a release of lethal nuclear waste. Fission may be environmentally friendly (no pollution), but it really isnt safe. Fusion power Like fission power, fusion power is also nuclear power. However, it uses fusion instead of fission. Fusion doesnt rely on splitting atoms into smaller ones. Fusion means fusing atoms which is building big atoms out of smaller ones. For example, the huge energy in the sun comes from a fusion reaction: 2H+3H=>4He+neutron. Two isotopes of hydrogen, deuterium and tritium, smash together to form helium and a neutron. This reaction happens between atomic nuclei and can be created in a lab. However, we need a temperature higher than the sun in order to make that reaction happen. In the sun, very high pressures exist, making the nuclei move faster, so fusion can happen at 15 million degrees Kelvin (Fusion 2100, JET.EFDA.org, 01:00). However, in laboratories we cant reach very high pressures, so we can only increase the temperature to 100 million degrees or more. Keeping that high a temperature inside a lab isnt something easy! (think of stuffing a piece of the sun into your room!) Tokamaks and Magnetic Confinement At 100 million degrees, matter goes into the th 4 state of matter called plasma. In the plasma state, electrons get so much energy that they fly away from the nucleus, exposing the protons and neutrons. Plasma has charge, so it can be affected by magnetic fields. Taking this advantage, scientists have invented something called a tokamak. Its donut-shaped, and it has a similarily-shaped magnetic field in it. Attracting the plasma, it prevents it from hitting the walls of the tokamak and destroying the station. The plasma is heated by passing

electricity through the tokamak and electromagnetic waves. However, tokamaks are as big as a factory and are difficult to build. Heating the plasma is also very hard, resulting in a huge energy input. As a result, scientists are finding different ways to confine and heat plasma. Inertial Confinement

Inertial confinement works by hitting solid deuterium and tritium with laser or ion beams. There is also gaseous fusion fuel inside the solid ball. The solid ball, heated up by laser beams, turns into plasma and starts to fuse on itself. A huge absorber is in the container preventing the lab from exploding. In this way, stable fusion can be achieved. Nevertheless, there are still big problems for inertial confinement. For example, it is difficult to create a solid ball of fusion fuel, and its also very difficult to create laser and ion beams that can heat matter from the solid state up to the plasma state. We cant just wait for that! How can we really get electricity from that? Well, we cant just put wires into the plasma to generate electricity! Then how do we really get electricity out of a tokamak? The walls of a tokamak have heat conductors in them. The neutrons resulting from the fusion reaction then slams into the wall, creating a great deal of heat. This heat is then passed by the conductors into a container filled with water. The heat boils the water, and the steam pushes turbines connected to a generator. In this way, electricity can be generated. Why is fusion so good? Fusion fuel is everywhere! Deuterium and tritium. These two names may sound like some sci-fi extraterrestrial element. Butdo you know that deuterium and tritium can be

extracted from the ground and from the ocean in huge amounts? Deuterium can be extracted from the oceans (the H in H2O is sometimes 2H), and though there is no natural tritium, it can be made from lithium. According to the JET (Joint European Torus) official website, even if we generate all of our electricity from fusion, deuterium can still last for millions of years and lithium can last for at least 1000 years. To give you a picture, forty trillion tons of deuterium can be extracted from the ocean as nuclear fuel (Future Science and Technology Discovery, 81, authors trans.) This large amount of fuel is much more than what we need! It is so efficient! One of the cardinal advantages of fusion power is its efficiency. Compare that to coals tiny energy output. The fusion of one gram of hydrogen-2 [deuterium] produces 5.7 X 107 kilocalories (Asimov, Understanding Physics). On the other hand, the energy contained in one gram of coal is about 30 kiloJoules (New Mexico Solar Energy Association). 30 kJ / 4.184=7.170 kilocalories. 57000000 versus 7.170. Isnt that number astounding? Though plasma is extremely thin and coal is relatively dense, the ratio is still very high. It is so safe! Nuclear power stations have a very bad reputation for being dangerous. That is the case for fission, but not for fusion. As I said before, fission is very unstable and can get out of control. However, if anything goes wrong, the first thing that happens in a fusion power station is a power loss, not an explosion or meltdown. This is because fusion reactions require high temperatures and are not completely self-sustained, so a failure makes the temperature decrease and the only bad thing that would happen is a temporary shutdown, and the station can be restarted quickly. On the other hand, fission reactions are chain reactions and the reactor is struggling to keep it from going out of control. Any failure will certainly result in an huge outburst of radioactive waste and even may cause complete destruction of the neighborhood. For years nobody can live there because of the radioactive waste. Really clean! The advantage of no atmospheric pollution is shared with fission, solar, tidal, and many other kinds of electric generation. However, other methods often are not environmentally friendly in other aspects. For example, wind and tidal power stations disrupt animal life, and the production of solar panels use rare materials. But fusion power overcomes all of these drawbacks. Fusion does not disrupt animals in any way, and the making of a fusion power station does not use any rare materials. Above all of these, fusion power stations are simplyclean! The best way to generate electricity! Fusion power is clean, efficient, and safe. It overcomes many drawbacks and disadvantages of our current electricity generation system, like initial cost,

pollution, poison, lack of fuel, danger, and much more. It is our best solution for our electricity generation problems. It is the best way to generate electricity.

References:
JET.EFDA.org, movie Fusion 2100 Future Science and Technology Discovery, 81 Princeton University CHM333 database: http://www.princeton.edu/~chm333/ New Energy Times website www.ITER.org (ITER official website) Library.ThinkQuest.org http://home.clara.net/darvill/ (Andy Darvills Science Site) http://www.TechnologyStudent.com/ http://Clean-Energy-Ideas.com/ http://AlternativeUse.com/ http://news.BBC.co.uk/ http://TheCanadianEncyclopedia.com/ (accessed through proxy) Columbia Encyclopedia (through http://www.answers.com) Isaac Asimovs Understanding Physics (accessed through www.jolomo.net)