Creating Energy

There have been many discussions over the years on the best way to create energy. Green advocates prefer renewable energies, such as solar, wind, and hydropower. Green advocates like these options because they are environmental friendly since they do not emit pollutants or carbon emissions. However, these types of energy sources are much more costly than traditional and more popular carbon energy sources such as gas, oil, coal, and natural gas.

There are many ways to create energy. The most popular way is by burning carbon fossil fuel sources such as coal and oil. Another way is to capture the natural energies created by our environment such as solar or even geothermal heat produced under the earth’s crust. Many energy sources such as wind and hydropower require the use of barriers to capture the energy – wind turbines and damns. The problem with most of these methods is to find cost effective ways to produce and store the energy as well as transporting it from remote regions around the country where winds are high and the sun is intense.

One energy source, nuclear energy, creates massive amounts of energy using a concept called nuclear fission. Nuclear fission is the process where uranium or plutonium atoms are split. Nuclear energy, like fossil fuel energies, use the heat created by the process to produce steam to turn massive turbines, which in turn, creates energy.

Another great way to create energy is through friction or polarity. Think of all the energy created when two individuals with different ideologies debate politics – too bad we cannot harness that energy into electricity. The same concept applies when creating energy using polarity methods such as antimatter. Antimatter is the opposite of matter. We learned in grade school science that all matter on earth is made up of protons, neutrons, and electrons. Antimatter is made up of positrons and antiprotons. A positron is the same as electron, but it is positively charged and an antiproton is the same as a proton, but it is negatively charged. Many physicists believe the mystery of how the universe was created can be uncovered by understanding antimatter. Scientists have had success creating both atoms of hydrogen and helium into antimatter. However, storing antimatter is an issue because it is quickly annihilated once it comes in contact with matter. When antimatter is combined with matter an equal amount of matter is absorbed and the antimatter disappears in the form of high energy gamma rays. Thus, creating and storing antimatter is both complicated and expensive. In fact, a super collider facility in Switzerland (used to create and store antimatter) cost hundreds of billions to construct. The super collider facility creates antimatter by colliding matter particles at massive speeds – the same way antimatter is created in our universe when comets and asteroids collide with planets.

How much energy can be created, in the form of gamma rays, when antimatter collides with matter? Well, consider that our entire universe may have been created by such a collision. In fact; many scientists fear that the creation of enough antimatter on earth could lead to it engulfing the earth’s matter; this is the same way black holes are created in the universe. An antimatter collision with matter generates magnitudes of more energy than a nuclear power plant.

The bottom line, if we can find a way to harness the energy created by our growing polarity we can solve our energy problems. If we spent less time bickering, complaining, fighting, and setting up one barrier after another and instead harnessed this energy, created by those barriers and ideology fights, we can solve our global energy problems.

My Book: Is America Dying? (Amazon.com, Barnes and Noble)