Our increasing reliance on natural gas brings with it both opportunities and dangers during the shift towards renewable energy. This issue deals with some major issues regarding natural gas deployment in industry, power generation, food production, and heating.
Everything has its price. Every form of power production has costs in dollars, time, land, materials, pollutants, greenhouse gas emissions, and human deaths. We look at the most important factors for analyzing the feasibility of a proposed power project. Considering only some of these factors will lead to an incomplete picture of power system costs.
How do we turn fusion power into electricity? There are two main methods. We can use heat engines like steam turbines or we can use a very new system called ‘direct conversion’ which has some interesting properties.
Issues and difficulties with creating a physical system for nuclear fusion. To succeed, we must face temperatures that vaporize all known materials and other requirements that make this the most difficult technological endeavor of our age.
Achieving sustained nuclear fusion for power production is incredibly challenging. Scientists have been working on this problem for decades. This piece is an overview of the basic concepts and technologies needed for nuclear fusion power. One could also view this as a tutorial, or a crash-course, in fusion power.