Our Needs for Energy and Ways to Satisfy Them

EUGENE P. WIGNER is a Nobel Prize Winner in Physics. The above remarks were made at the Louisiana State University Nuclear Energy Symposium held on April 23, 1976. [They have been edited for print by removing references to other speakers and by minor textual emendations.—Ed.] 

General Articles on Nuclear Energy and Energy Policy 

For very energy-rich substances, such as coal, oil, or nuclear fuel, the TqS term is very small as compared with the term of true energy U, so that practically all the energy content of these materials is available.  

Unfortunately, or fortunately, there is no general formula giving the amount of energy which we could extract from a substance with the skill we possess, and most of our discussion will be devoted to this subject. 

The next fact I want to mention is that the sun rays energy falling on our country amounts to 10,000 kilowatts per person. This is, of course, very much more than in the other countries I mentioned because the density of our population is hardly more than one tenth of the average density of the populations of these countries. Nevertheless, it shows that if the sun rays energy could be made available with reasonable efficiency, the energy problem would be close to its solution everywhere. 

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E.P. Wigner, Our Needs for Energy and Ways to Satisfy Them , Revista Interamericana VI, 485 (1976). 

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