The chief source of the enormous quantities of energy used daily by
modern civilization is fossil fuels in the form of coal, petroleum, and
natural gas. Concentrated sources of these fuels, though large, are far
from inexhaustible, and it has been said that future historians may
refer to the brief time when they were used as “the fossil-fuel
incident.”
[Illustration: _These lights of downtown Pittsburgh are symbolic of
the generation of electricity by atomic power from Shippingport,
Pennsylvania, the site of the world’s first full-scale
atomic-electric generation station exclusively for civilian needs.
Homes and factories of the greater Pittsburgh area are receiving the
electricity produced at the plant and transmitted through the
Duquesne Light Company system. The Shippingport plant is a joint
project of Westinghouse Electric Corporation, U. S. Atomic Energy
Commission, and the Duquesne Light Company._
Courtesy Westinghouse Electric Corporation]
The next great source of energy will probably be nuclear reactors, in
which controlled chain reactions release energy from the large store of
fissionable materials in the world.[5]
The accomplishments of nuclear power in the propulsion of ships have
already been noted. In addition, there is now going on in industrialized
countries in different parts of the world a large-scale development of
nuclear power plants for production of electricity. Nuclear electric
power is approaching the point where it will be economically competitive
with power from hydroelectric plants or those burning coal, oil, or gas
as fuels. Improvements in nuclear power technology are rapidly being
made, and it is now widely predicted that before the end of this century
most new electric power plants will be nuclear.