Energy - Environment - Economy
Our present publication consists of five parts. In the introduction the guest editor of this issue György Vajda provides the keynote by outlining the general situation, connections, trends and possible tasks. In the chapter on Technical trends and prospects we examine the different energetic resources as well as production technologies. Béla Nagy writes primarily about domestic coal and uranium supplies with a slight polemic overtone. Dániel Magyari and László Tihanyi provide excellent analysis on one of the most important and, due to the processes in world politics and economy, the most worrysome resources of the present and the near future - hydrocarbones. Károly Reményi as well as Zoltán Szatmáry describes the new technological possibilities of two different, competing types of power plants - coal and nuclear, both of determining importance from the viewpoint of energy production in the coming one or two decades. Gergely Büki writes about expectable breakthroughs in power plant technologies. In our present issue we cover two of the renewable resources: Gábor Horváth and László Tóth analyse the utilisation of wind energy and Dániel Puppán that of bio-fuels.
The next chapter of our volume examines the more and more prominent environmental impacts. Ernő Mészáros'’s primary focus is on whether the climatic changes of the previous years have been due to natural processes or human activities. György Bárdossy and Árpád Veres outline in their studies an outstandingly important field which is causing great concern or even anxiety among societies: the handling, disposal and possible utilisation of nuclear waste. Imre Szebényi also discusses environment-related issues.
The next chapter examines a field of a great complexity and many aspects. Rudolf Czelnai in his excellent essay analyses the complex problems related to the environment and the influencing of society. László Kapolyi and Gyula Lengyel describe the economical and price-related questions of electric energy systems with an original approach. László B. Sztanyik examines the physiological impacts and consequences of energetic environmental effects of interest to the society and individuals alike. Tamás Katona, Sándor Rátkai, Ágnes Jánosiné Bíró and Csaba Gorondi discuss an issue of basic influence on the Hungarian electric energy supply in connection with capacity and life-time increase of the nuclear power plant in Paks. Balázs Kováts analyses social opinion about nuclear energy production based on data from a series of surveys over several years, while Ada Ámon discourses on the energetic conception of greens with more of an emotional than factual approach.
The last chapter contains two book reviews in connection with energy with the writings of Ödön A. Kerényi and Dénes Berényi.
A final apologetic remark: it would only be proper by the reader to miss from this selection such important, variously applicable and increasingly developed renewable energy resources such as fuel-cell power supplies, systems directly utilising solar energy or the most important renewable resource: hydroelectric power. Besides, less important, not very economical or for some other reason less significant solutions are also missing, such as geothermal energy utilisation or tidal power plants, which hardly come into question in Hungary anyway. One such publication however (which does not aspire to achieving a handbook status), can only be finished and not completed, and what is more, our intentions were limited by size constraints as well. We promise however, that - similarly to our other thematic issues (like in the case of the one on Information Society, the topics of which we have returned to several times since its first publication) - we are going to continue this present one, partly with those fields listed here, partly with new discoveries and implementations, or even with so called ‘crazy ideas’.