UCD professor notes importance of nuclear power in providing energy to run one of the engines of our culture.
An excerpt.
The new nukes
As the planet heats up, prominent environmentalists now agree with George W. Bush that nuclear energy may be our last best hope. Has panic set in
By R.V. Scheide
"Here's what's really important," says UC Davis physics professor David Hwang, fingering a wall switch. “The air conditioning works.”
It’s mid-July, and at 11 in the morning, it’s already pushing a balmy 90 degrees at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. Here, in the laboratory complex founded by Edward Teller, father of the hydrogen bomb, Hwang and a team of UC Davis scientists and engineers conduct research in experimental plasma physics, work that may someday become an integral part of the world’s first functioning fusion reactor.
Such a reactor might produce as much as 40,000 megawatts of electricity, enough to power 40 million medium-sized, 1,000-watt air conditioners, one for every man, woman and child in the state of California.
Summer just got a whole lot cooler.
The additional 40,000-megawatt kick would come in handy right now in California, where successive 100-degree days recently pushed statewide electrical usage above 50,000 megawatts for the first time ever, causing energy officials to warn of rolling blackouts.
