Word: powers
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Dates: during 2000-2000
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...water development has, like nuclear energy, amounted to a Faustian bargain between civilization and the natural world--which, as it happens, supports civilization. Hydroelectricity from Grand Coulee Dam in Washington State smelted enough aluminum during World War II to build tens of thousands of warplanes, with enough surplus power to make plutonium for the first atom bombs. But now, in the form of devastated salmon fisheries, Grand Coulee (along with countless other dams) is extracting an awful price for its creation...
...research center outside Stuttgart, Germany, engineers at DaimlerChrysler have created a high-performance car whose tail pipe emits nothing but water vapor. In a giant wind tunnel at NASA's Ames Research Center in California, engineers are set to analyze air turbulence in order to make superefficient wind-power turbines. In Japan scientists are perfecting paper-thin solar cells that will be cheap to produce and could turn every house into its own electricity supplier. These ventures, along with many others, are beginning to draw the outlines of a world in which energy use keeps rising and, though fossil fuels...
Cars like the NECAR4, housed in a lab near Stuttgart, could help make that happen. This experimental vehicle, being jointly developed by Ford, DaimlerChrysler and Canada's Ballard Power Systems, gets its energy from hydrogen--the most abundant fuel in the entire universe. Hydrogen, unlike fossil fuels, contains no carbon atoms and thus generates zero carbon dioxide. However, it could produce some pollution, since burning hydrogen taints the atmosphere by rearranging air molecules to form nitrogen oxides and ozone...
Fuel cells were invented in the 1800s and adopted by NASA for generating clean power in space in the 1960s. Only in the past decade have they been made small enough to fit inside a car. The NECAR4, based on a Mercedes-Benz A-class compact sedan, accommodates five people plus luggage, reaches speeds of 90 m.p.h. (145 km/h) and goes about 280 miles (450 km) between fill-ups. "It's comparable," says Ferdinand Panik, head of DaimlerChrysler's Fuel Cell Project, "to the impact the microchip had on computer technology...
...gigantic size, rapid industrialization and huge domestic coal reserves threaten to pump cataclysmic amounts of CO2 into the air over the next century. While scaling fuel cells down to fit inside cars and trucks has been a challenge, scaling them up or linking them together to run factories and power plants should be no problem...