Did y'all know UT plans to make a particle accelerator on campus? I know this because my friend was given an invitation to be part of the team that will develop and design the accelerator. when my friend told me about it, i thought to myself how we could use a particle accelerator to make energy? the first thing that popped into my mind was fusion!! fusion is a desirable energy source, because it inexhaustible and it doesn't produce any greenhouse gases. it does however make some radioactive waste but it is short-lived radioactivity. fusion works by taking two hydrogen atoms and combining them together to make a helium atom and a neutron. this extra neutron is what is converted into energy. as we know hydrogen is everywhere that is why fusion is inexhaustible. in fact given a gallon of water, it would be equivalent to 300 gallons of gasoline. unfortunately there is still a lot of research that needs to be done. wouldn't it be cool if we could research fusion here at UT!?
website: science.doe.gov/ofes/whatisfusion.shtml
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ReplyDeleteI agree that there is a lot of potential in fusion and that we have not had a concerted effort towards researching fusion. I also think that fusion is a great research expansion point for UT if there really is a push towards fusion- if the money is there than UT should go after it. However, after reading the DoE article online I am a bit puzzled. One of the main points of DoE's argument for fusion is that fusion creates more energy than it uses. I thought that we proved in class that anytime you convert energy from one source to another (even the same source) you lose energy? Also, it's great that we have an abundance of Hydrogen (Hydrogen is the 3rd most abundant element on Earth), but most if it is in the Earth's oceans. After our lecture on the "scarcity" of drinkable water in the future, will fusion be able to use ocean water, and if not, maybe in the future the question will not be about the scarcity of oil, but rather the scarcity of water.
ReplyDeleteWell the point you are trying to make about the energy input versus output would be dealing with entropy, or the law that you cannot ever get out what you put in, and if you look at the system as a whole then that is probably true. The energy to build the fusion reactor and the energy used to construct the materials. But if you look beyond those fixed "costs" of energy then it would make sense that the energy input versus output would be exponential. At this level you would literally be dealing with Einstein's equation E = mC^2 where the amount of energy created for the tiny change in mass with the hydrogen atoms huge, simply due to the energy stored within. It is like lighting a match, the match itself does not cost that much energy, but you can start a wild fire which in comparison is much larger. But if you look at how much energy it also took to create the match; finding the right tree, energy to grow the tree, energy to cut down the tree and the energy to produce the match then you would obviously be using more energy than you will get out of the match.
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