chapter 19 review questions
1.) Energy is the capacity to do work. Power is the rate of flow of energy.
2.) The major sources of commercial energy are in order from greatest to least; oil, coal, gas, hydro, nuclear, and wind. Commercial energy is the most common use of this energy, it is directed towards all endeavors.
3.) Energy use exceeds most other countries, for having only 5 percent of the global population, it consumes one quarter of available energy.
4.) 10 trillion metric tons are the estimated amounts of total resource. 90% of reserves are in the US, Russia, China, India, and Australia.
5.) Coal bed methane is methane gas trapped under a layer of coal. The reason it is controversial is because it is highly explosive and leads to poisoning.
6.) Fossil fuel is the cause of serious loss of forests and soil. It degrades air quality, creates smog, and pollutes the water supply.
7.) Nuclear reactors start at fuel assembly, rods of uranium are bound together, put into a reactor and subjected to nuclear fission, where steam is created which powers a turbine. The danger of it is in the cooling process, if the reactor is not manually cooled it will burn up, if coolant leeks and doesn’t reach the reactor, serious problems occur, Chernobyl occurs.
8.) The four types of reactor designs are pressurized water reactors, using water as its coolant. European models use graphite, where the moderator and structural material for the reactor core are graphite. High temperature Gas Cooled Reactors, and Process inherent ultimate safety reactor which has a small core that cannot generate enough heat to become dangerous.
9.) The pros and cons of the breeder reactor are that it produces fuel rather than consumes it, creates fissionable plutonium and thorium isotopes from the abundant, but stable, forms or uranium. The cons are that the reactor core must be at a very high density to work, also liquid sodium must be used to cool it, which is very corrosive and difficult to handle.
10.) The past has shown that tossing nuclear waste into the ocean is a bad idea. Now we usually use land disposal, some using deep water filled pools to store them, others use containers deep under ground in stable rock formations, where vaults are built to hold the waste.
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