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Politics : Formerly About Applied Materials -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Kirk © who wrote (45998)	4/28/2001 1:06:33 PM
From: Katherine Derbyshire	Read Replies (5) \| Respond to of 70976

OT Matter and energy >>One way to "Store Energy" is to convert it to matter and put it on a shelf until needed. I have a cord of this in my back yard drying that I will burn next winter. CA and WA put a bunch of it behind dams and then drop it but fusion reactors might be much more fun (efficient) in the future.<< I hate to nitpick, but neither woodburning stoves nor dams convert matter into energy. In wood, oxidation (a chemical reaction) releases the energy stored in carbon-carbon bonds. The number of atoms of carbon and oxygen after the reaction precisely equals the number before the reaction. The amount of energy before and after is the same, too. Hydropower merely converts the potential energy of the water to kinetic energy. You have exactly the same amount of water when you're done. You would get the same amount of energy by dropping an equal mass of sand, feathers, or chocolate bars. (I'm ignoring frictional losses for the time being.) Water is only "better" than these other items because nature does the work of transporting it to the top of the hill for you. A fusion reaction, on the other hand, smashes hydrogen atoms together until they transform into helium atoms. When you're done, the hydrogen atoms are irrevocably (short of a fission reaction) gone. The missing subatomic particles (not part of the helium atoms or otherwise accounted for) are gone, too, transformed into energy according to Einstein's equation. Which is why a fusion reaction gives many times more energy than burning an equivalent mass of wood. Katherine