Brief Introduction to the Energy Seminar and

Energy for Planet Earth, an Overview

In this, the opening Energy Seminar of Fall 2020, we will begin with a brief discussion of the Energy Engineering Seminar Series as a Course.  We will then have a look at the current energy portfolios of the World and of the United States and how we reached this point in energy resource history.  How much energy we need versus how much we use, and some of the consequences of that use, will be part of the discussion. We will then offer possible options for World and US energy resource portfolios in the future based upon today’s capabilities, including fossil fuels, solar, wind, nuclear, etc., and tomorrow’s possibilities, such as fusion.

BIO: Professor David Hammer has been a Cornell faculty member since 1977, first as a member of the Nuclear Science and Engineering Program and since 1995 as a Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering. Dr. Hammer worked at the Naval Research Laboratory (1969-1976) and was an Associate Professor at UCLA for a year before coming to Cornell. His research interests while at Cornell have been in pulsed-power-driven intense charged particle beams and high energy density plasmas.  He was chair of the American Physical Society’s Division of Plasma Physics in 2003-2004 , and is a Fellow of the American Physical Society, of the IEEE and of the American Association for the Advancement of Science