Energy Sources

In this essay the pros and cons of the most commonly known energy source will be explained along with efficiency ratings and the amount of pollution they cause. The energy sources I will be talking about include wind power, solar power, the fuel cell process, nuclear power, and fossil fuel power.

It is proven wind generators have a very mild, hardly if any effect on the environment. If anything a bird might fly into the propellers or a cluster of wind generators might somehow generate a magnetic field disrupting migratory bird's route during migration season. Another problem would be lack of wind. Imagine if we relied mostly or entirely on wind power, if we had no wind going things would be thrown into chaos and confusion, people would be helpless in someplaces, looting would be abundant and many other problems would be occurring.

Solar panels are a pretty clean energy source that harvests the suns light and converts it to electricity. The only problem here is the leakage of a certain material that damages the environment. Solar panels are also quite delicate and get knock out of alignment pretty easily. If a storm arose clouds would block out light and debris could damage the solar panel. This is another device that we could not entirely or mostly rely on.

There is a new technique recently developed called proton exchange membrane fuel cell, it is ultra clean and has only one by-product: Water! The fuel cell process involves combining oxygen and hydrogen together to form water and direct current (DC) electricity. There is only on down side to this process, and that is storing the hydrogen because hydrogen does not occur naturally in our atmosphere. Hydrogen is the smallest atom known to man, to illustrate imagine trying to carry water with a strainer, pretty difficult, eh? So researchers have developed a method of storing methanol or hydrocarbons and then later extracting the hydrogen from these compounds. The only problem with this is it will be impure hydrogen which will lower the efficiency ratings of the fuel cell motor.

Nuclear power has been around since the early 1950s. It is clean with the exception of producing of radioactive waste which has to be stored somewhere, plus there is a risk nuclear meltdown. It is still extremely efficient, for example a golf ball sized lump of uranium can fuel a nuclear powered submarine for 13,700 leagues or 66144 kilometres. Uranium-238 has a half-life of 4.5 billion years and makes up 99 percent of the total amount of uranium on the earth. I can't explain the process of nuclear reactors in one small paragraph so I'll just say that heat from the uranium is used heat water, create steam, and that steam spins turbines. For more information go to http://science.howstuffworks.com/nuclear-power3.html .

Fossil fuels or crude oil has been around for a long time and can be refined to form a number of products. Such products include gas, naptha, gasoline, kerosene, gas oil or diesel, and other things. This form of an energy source is used in many things such as generators, electricity, automobiles, aircraft, watercraft, and many other things. While this is a very strong and versatile energy source it still is an excellent energy source. We are also running out of crude oil, a non-renewable resource.

After evaluating on wind power, solar power, fuel cell power, nuclear power, and fossil fuel power, I've decided the fuel cell process is the best way to go, (unless they develop cold fusion) fuel cell power is almost impeccably clean and is quite efficient.