Fuel is the Most Useful Energy of All
Fuel is the Most Useful Energy of All
Storing Electrons on Scale is a Fool's Errand
Useful Energy means what you think it means. It is energy that's available where & when we need it. The most Useful Energy (except for hydro) is based on fuel that makes heat. Nuclear fission makes 6 orders of magnitude more heat than combustion.
The usefulness of energy (fuel - be it wood, peat, gasoline, coal, uranium) is our ability to dispatch or use it when and where we need the energy for the purpose we intend. The Anglo-Saxons, for instance, collected firewood in February.
Today, some 2.3 billion human beings rely on cow dung (the Indian market is valued at $4 Billion) and such to cook food and for heat. Over 3 million (about 1/2 of the Haulocaust fatalities) die annually because they cannot afford cleaner fuel.
In 1751, Benjamin Franklin published a marvelous book about electrical energy: Experiments and Observations on Electricity Made at Philadelphia in America. If you read it, you'll find several highly relevant discussions. Here is a free copy, courtesy of the Smithsonian Libraries.
In his first letter, from 1747, observation 2, states:
Describing the top of the generator as “positive” and the bottom as “negative,” Franklin noted with apparent frustration: “in exact proportion: i.e. whatever quantity of electrical fire is thrown in at top, an equal quantity goes out of the bottom.”
Continuing, he explained:
“no more can be thrown into the upper part, when no more can be driven out of the lower part. If you attempt to throw more in, it is spued back thro' the wire, or flies out in loud cracks thro' the sides of the bottle.”
No matter how he tried to store and contain the current, it was impossible. It just leaked out the bottom. If a bit ever was contained for a moment, it found its way out through some pathway or other.
For all its wonders as an on-demand Energy Servant, electrical energy is not a fuel that can be stored like firewood, coal, or cow dung. Rather, on-demand electrical Service is produced from fuel. Because it is the on-demand part of electrical service that makes it useful.
How many times have you heard that the only "missing link" for wind and solar to lead Civilization to Nirvana and change the Climate is "storage"? It's so common that we don't question it.
And who can blame the notion? None other than Yale School for Environment and such are constantly publishing stories highlighting breakthroughs in electrical energy storage.
Batteries: The New Fuel
Yet stop and think. The technology is simply attempting to convert electrical energy into Fuel. Guess what? It's just as hard to do this today as it was in 1747. The scale of batteries being proposed would literally consume all the minerals on earth, in perpetituity. Absurdities within enigmas within absurdities.
Imagine the Diesel Fuel wasted on non-recyclable Rube Goldberg batteries and such other nonsense. It is simply absurd to try to store electrical energy to use as fuel—the energy density of stored electricity is absurd.
In 2021, the whole world consumed 600 exajoules of energy. Without trying hard, we mined uranium ($30-ish per pound market value at the time), with a fuel energy value of 3,500 exajoules—nearly 6 times as much.
Hydro-power is an outlier. The pooled water acts like a battery. Except for pumped hydro, Mother Nature provides the kinetic energy potential. Hydro readily converts water into electrical current, on-demand. Problem is that the Climate is unreliable.
Hydro-power is an outlier. The pooled water acts like a battery. Except for pumped hydro, Mother Nature provides the kinetic energy potential. Hydro readily converts water into electrical current, on-demand. Problem is, believe it or not, that the Climate is unreliable.
Hold My Beer
The Natrium energy storage heat battery, invented by Cal Abel, PhD, and donated to humanity, is a battery that shall change the world. It's already happened, just as suredly as Rudolph Diesel's engine killed the steam engine. Professor Ruzic saw it and produced a whole lecture on it:
The advantages and efficiencies of nuclear-powered heat storage are too many to digest. But here are some thoughts from The Breakthrough Institute.
Nuclear Power produces orders of magnitude more useful energy, with orders of magnitude fewer natural resource inputs, for the longest periods of time, than any other energy engine ever devised by humans. Its widespread use is inevitable. The sooner we realize this the better.
What ticks me off is all these dunces and salesmen, including Musk, saying that the Megacharger for Tesla trucks will be powered off of solar with Megapower batteries. What craziness. You take a giant 800kwh battery for a Tesla semi which is costly enough, and has great supply difficulties, and these idiots want to just double that up by adding additional Megapower batteries of the same capacity. 2X the batteries. Of course all the gargantuam subsidies many areas put on batteries and solar/wind power, Musk might make a profit on that.
Absolutely fascinating. It’s obvious that we have a lot of work to do to generate what is needed for a planet. This will be an ongoing project for decades.