TABLE OF CONTENTS BY
PASCAL M. RAPIER Scientist III, Retired, Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory.
ANDREW C. KLEIN Associate Professor, Nuclear Engineering, Oregon State University.
PAUL E. CRAWFORD, ESQ. Partner, Connolly, Bove, Lodge & Hutz, Wilmington, DE.
R. ERIC HUTZ, ESQ. Associate, Connolly, Bove, Lodge & Hutz, Wilmington, DE.
by Pascal M. Rapier and Andrew C. Klein
REFERENCES: McGraw-Hill Encyclopedia of Environmental Science. Beckmann, Health Hazards of Not Going Nuclear, Golem Press, Boulder, CO. Edinger et al., Heat Exchange and Transport in the Environment, P.B. 240757 NTIS, USDA, Nov. 1974. Corbitt, Standard Handbook of Environmental Engineering, McGraw-Hill.
Nature has provided two almost inexhaustible sumps for maintaining a steady state environment on earth. The first of these is the 2.7 K background temperature of absolute space, which nature uses for heat rejection to close its heat balances. The second is the oceans, which serve to close the material balances of its cyclic processes by accepting the combined runoffs of the continents. The greatest engineering progress comes when people control their environmental activities so as to take maximum advantage at minimum cost of these sumps and of nature s cyclic processes. This is the basic principle upon which the science of environmental control is founded. With it, any environmental problem can be modeled on a conveniently small scale and then solved precisely by LeChatelier s controlled equilibria principle for any large-scale operation. When the principle is applied to obtain optimum yield of a desired end product or...
