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I need some help about science?

I was wounder ing if you could do this for me beacuse my dad died a monthago and i have loads of homework and i have not even been through this but despite that i have to do it this is it:You are working for the government and have been given the assignment of finding an alternative fuel because Fossil Fuels will be running out in a month!!!! Your research project will consist of 2 parts:

RRRAAARGH… I hate it when teachers give propaganda disguised as projects. What a crock of BS.

I’ll help you, simply because you asked nicely, and I’m bored waiting for boot camp (9 days to go! Woohoo!)

Geothermal:

Advantages:

Very little emissions, because the steam is generated through nuclear decay in the Earth’s core. The result is clean energy. Additionally, it can be done on a large scale because there’s a lot of heat in the core. The only question is how much is cost-effective to harness.

Disadvantages:

Geothermal energy requires a huge amount of maintenance. The corrosive nature of sulfur and other nasty materials that are found in geothermal vents requires constant upkeep to prevent the power plant from failing.

Also, geothermal energy is only cost-effective close to volcanoes, where molten rock is close to the surface. Placing it just anywhere would be extremely expensive to maintain. The fact that these power plants are near volcanoes means that if the volcano decides to erupt, everyone in the power station is toast.

If you limit geothermal energy to extinct volcanoes, geothermal energy’s potential is even more limited.

Fossil fuels:

Advantages: Cheap, powerful, and constant. The big three. Fossil fuels are the perfect power plant fuel, drawbacks excluded. That’s why everyone uses them.

Disadvantages. I’m not going to put quantity there, because our oil and coal reserves keep going up every year, and we get more efficient every year. The only people who are screaming, “We’re running out of oil” are morons who don’t realize that we’ve been worrying about running out of oil ever since we started using it. Every time we start running out, we develop new techniques for extraction and find more oil that was previously too expensive to extract.

Carbon dioxide emissions are only a problem if you’re worried about the crap that Al Gore is peddling. Yes, the Earth is warming. No, it’s not going to kill us all. In fact, it’ll lead to an end for world hunger.

Pollution is a problem if you’re using low-grade coal. No one likes living in a cloud of sulfur dioxide. The problem can be remedied if you use clean coal.

Nuclear:

Advantages:

HUGE amount of energy produced with a single power plant. Refined uranium is a very potent source of energy, and a pound of the stuff has more energy than a ton of coal. That’s pretty awesome.

Because so little uranium is needed to produce a huge amount of energy, there is almost a limitless supply of uranium in the Earth’s crust to mine. Uranium is one of the most common minerals in the soil, and current estimates show that we have around 12,000 years of power if we switch over.

No gaseous pollution. The only thing produced is steam from the cooling towers.

Disadvantages:

The problem is that once the uranium is used, you end up with a bunch of radioactive polonium that is useless and quite dangerous to human life. This stuff has to be disposed of where it can’t be disturbed by water (corrosion of its containers) and where it can’t harm anyone nearby. The best place would be in Nevada (Yucca Mountain) or Utah (somewhere out in the salt flats). Either way, transportation of such hazardous material is going to be expensive, especially if it’s being transported from somewhere like Maine.

Expensive measures have to be taken just in case there’s a meltdown. American power plants have what’s called a containment building, where even if the reactor melts down, the material is caught before it gets scattered everywhere, like what happened in Chernobyl. The result is something like Three Mile Island, where the reactor failed but no one died. It was very expensive to clean up, though.

Solar:

Advantages: The sun has a huge amount of power, and it’s free. Solar panels can be placed just about anywhere, and they produce no emissions. Also, because there’s no turbines being used, (the solar cells directly generate electricity) there is much less maintenance required.

Disadvantages: What if it’s cloudy? Nighttime? The sun is not out 24/7. How are you going to store all the energy required to run millions of homes? A bunch of batteries is going to be VERY expensive. Hell, they can’t even get a car to work on batteries. How are you going to power a city on them? The only way to power a city would be to have a backup generator… which would probably end up being coal or nuclear. In that case, you need to have two power grids – one for the solar energy, and the other for the backup. That’s prohibitively expensive.

Hydroelectric:

Advantages: No pollution, lots of power created for little cost, and it also doesn’t occupy any land that could be used to build something more desirable. Who’s going to want to build a house on a river?

I continued my post in the sources section. Damn Yahoo Answers’ character limit.

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