Word: hydrogenic
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...will man fill his future need for energy when the world begins to run out of readily accessible supplies of gas and oil? One answer now being investigated is hydrogen. It is an extremely efficient fuel that burns with almost no pollution, and the supply is virtually limitless in the water that covers two-thirds of the earth's surface...
...economics of energy production now limits hydrogen to a small role. To extract hydrogen from water or petroleum products with conventional electrolytic processes makes it cost about three times as much per unit of energy as natural gas. Of the 7 trillion cu. ft. produced annually, most is used in refining ores and in making ammonia. NASA powers its moon rockets with liquid hydrogen, but that is prohibitively expensive for use as a common fuel...
...Soviet Union's self-styled "civil rights movement." A number of prominent dissidents, mostly Jews like Yakir, have recently been pressured into emigrating (TIME, June 19). However, a hard core of activists is obviously determined to keep the movement alive. Physicist Andrei Sakharov, father of the Russian hydrogen bomb and a leading critic of the current regime, last week released a letter he had written to Party Chief Leonid Brezhnev, protesting the increase of "persecution for political and ideological reasons...
...Interest. Nuclear Pioneer George Weil agrees, calling the breeder concept "dangerous and unproved." Some objections focus on the use of liquid sodium (a tricky substance that explodes on contact with water and burns in air) as a cooling medium. Others concern the fuel, plutonium, the basic ingredient of the hydrogen bomb and one of the deadliest substances known. Finally, the critics wonder how to get rid of radioactive wastes from any nuclear reactor, some of which remain lethal for 500,000 years. At present, the AEC plans to store them in large concrete containers at an as yet unspecified location...
FUSION. The ideal solution is to reproduce the sun's own process of joining atomic nuclei to produce clean, safe energy. The process, which also powers the hydrogen bomb, releases so much energy, and the hydrogen used as fuel is so abundant in sea water, that fusion could fill the world's electricity needs for millions of years. But the practical difficulties of confining nuclear particles in "bottles" of magnetic energy (at temperatures approaching 60 million degrees F.) are such that most experts do not foresee fusion working before 1990 at the earliest...