Weird Ways to Generate Electricity

movies for the rest of this episode. Actually that's not true. We're going to talk about energy and electricity and waste and ways that we can be smarter about generating electricity and hopefully managing the waste problem that we have while

trying to create electricity. In a previous episode, we talked about fusion, which is where you fuse to light atoms together and in the process you release quite a bit of energy in the form of heat, which then turns water into steam, and that steam then turned steam turbines, which then connected to electrical generators creates electricity. Yeah right, right, which which is a lot more efficient than anything that we have today, um like like nuclear fission right right.

If we can, if we can get fusion to work as promise, we have to make sure that the reactions themselves are giving off enough energy that it's more than what was required for us to get that reaction started in the first place. That's where we're kind of hitting the wall right now. We don't know for sure that we can do that. So fusion is a great possibility, and I think it's it's an excellent place to do research.

But we shouldn't put all our eggs in one basket. Yes, no, don't put all your electro eggs in one energy basket, as I said, right, because that could be a big problem. Think about this. I mean, imagine that even if we are able to get a positive energy gain factor and a fusion reactor within a hundred years, there's no guarantee that will make it that long unless we look at

al Yeah. So so fusion may not work at all, which means that we need to look into alternatives anyway, and if it does work, it may be decades there. So either way, looking into alternatives where we maximize our production of electricity, which is really what we're talking about here, and we minimize the waste that's going to be important because we don't if we if in a hundred years we get fusion, but the world is not really a

livable space anymore. It's not going to be so pleasant for the human race anyway, so we have to look into these alternatives. Well, Jonathan, I like the way you put that with in terms of maximizing and minimizing, because I think a lot of the innovations that are going to get us into the future, um aren't just you know, crazy new ideas that nobody has ever heard of before, you know, like a completely out of left field new technology.

A lot of it is just going to be um finding smarter, more efficient ways to do the thing this we already do. Sure, Yeah, yeah, definitely looking for energy where we can find it. And I mean we've got lots of examples of this and things like you know, the the improvement of efficiency and wind turbines and solar farms,

but those have been talked about a lot nausea. Yeah, And one of the one of the basic problems with creating energy is that we don't have an infante supply of coal or oil or uranium or any of the other things that we're currently using to produce it. Right, And just in case anyone wants to write in and yell creating electricity, we know energy can either be created nor destroyed. We can only convert mass into energy, which

is still not creating it. It's just a transformation. Yeah yeah, you know, Hey, I obey the laws of physics, all right, so don't send them after me. But one of the things that Joe found out when he was researching this episode, I mean, Joe wrote the video episode about energy and you discovered an interesting approach to making nuclear fission reactions more efficient, because that's one of the problems with nuclear fission. Right. Well, so we've had nuclear fission for years and years, but um,

there are a lot of problems with it. It creates really really toxic nuclear waste that you have to protect, you know, you lock it up in graphite beams and bury it underground under a mountain. Right. It's it's all, it's all so dangerous that it's technically the as soon

as it's created, it belongs to the government. It belongs to the Department of Energy to right, Yeah, that's exactly who I want to have access to all the most dangerous things in the world, right, And then there are and then there's the fact that we're not really getting all of the energy that we can out of these fuel rods. I mean, so what do you what do you use to cause a reaction and a fission reactor and your standard nuclear power plant you have fuel rods

that are full of tiny uranium pellets refined URANIU. Yeah, it's not just highlighting rich yeah exactly. Um, that you use to you set off a reaction in them, and that that creates a fission reaction that releases a lot of energy, heats water, and creates your electricity. Um. The problems we've said so far waste um not the most efficient reaction. Also, there's a big danger as we learned from the Fushima incident during the earthquake Noble and three

Mile Island, although that wasn't the meltdown. But yeah, but so uh, these reactors are potentially very dangerous. You have to be extremely careful with them. Is there a way to get around this? And that's where the waste annihilating molten salt reactor from Transitomic comes in. It's a cool name. Yeah, it just rolls off the tongue. As I said in in the episode yeah, I like to call it wamser. You know, wams are waste annihilating molten salt reaction. Then

you don't get to say annihilating and annihilating annihilating. Yeah, well I say that so frequently in my daily life. But yeah, the idea here is to try and maximize that efficiency. In fact, Transatomic claims on their website that the conventional nuclear reactors that use fission reactions only capture about three of the potential fission energy and a given amount of uranium before the uranium has to be removed

from the reactor or else you're in danger of a meltdown. Uh. Their design, again, the company claims, will capture of the remaining energy that would have otherwise been lost. That's pretty yeah, that's that's that's incredibly more efficient if that. In fact, if you buy their claim, it combines several existing technologies. It um so the waste annihilating molten salt reactor. It uses this, uh, this molten salt. You might ask, what

is molten salt? Well, you don't usually encounter molten salt in your day to day life, but um, but in this case, it's it's not um molten salt doesn't like become the fuel or something like that. Molten salt is what this reactor uses to manage its heat. Yeah, as you are using the uranium in that initial fission reaction, you are getting nuclear waste as a result. You dissolve the nuclear waste or rather transitomic would dissolve the nuclear

waste within this molten salt, which manages the heat. And it means that if you want to really simplify it, it means that the reactor can safely maintain the temperature it needs to continue to turn water into steam to turn those steam turbines and generate electricity. So you're you are really extending the useful life out of that uranium. And uh, as a result, less of the uranium is left behind. And uranium that's the that's the radioactive material

that is so dangerous. Less nuclear waste at the yeah, the the or at least less radioactive waste. I mean, however you wanted to find it, it's gonna be Le's radioactive waste. And from the estimates I saw, it reduces the amount of time where this radioactive waste is dangerous from the thousands of years two around three hundred years. Still longer than anyone's comfortable lifespan, obviously, but that's a

huge difference from this. You know, it won't be safe to go near for ten thousand years because marking that barrel is difficult. Well, it also means that if you're able to build these reactors, then it's there's the potential of taking nuclear waste that has already been generated and using that as a fuel, which there are tons and tons of just kind of lying about. Really, I mean, well,

I hope it's that. Yeah, I'm thinking about some cities I visited where I thought barrels of nuclear waste would not seem out of place. But I would like to think that they are mostly confined in fairly secure, according to the to the documentary Duke Newcomb's according to Duke Newcomb, they are a tasty shake. Um. Yeah. I know. Something else that I thought was interesting, this is just sort of an aside, is that the company has three founders.

Two of them are M. I. T. Students, and the third is Rust Wilcox, who was the former CEO of e INK. And I never would have thought of electronic ink and uh, nuclear fission going hand in hand. But it's interesting because you know, e ink is all about efficiency to it's this idea of that you create a state of the ink, so it's displaying either a a neutral side or a dark side to the screen, and it maintains that until you change the state of the

electrostatic field, which means that you know, once you establish it. Yeah, you establish it and it stays that way. That's why if you're using an e reader, it's not using energy until you turn the page, so in between page turns, that's that's why those batteries last forever, because it's not using a lot of electricity. So in that case, that's the only thing I can think of that's similar between the two. This isn't a new idea, I don't think.

I think that they were first proposed to power bombers, and one was operated back in the sixties and seventies at a Gridge National Labs, So it's it's been around for a minute, but just you know, not in a there are newer and better designs, I think, right, exactly, Yeah, Because again, if it's one of those things where it's a a modest increase in efficiency, it may not be

worth the expense of turning around uranium. Yeah, Yeah, design, either designing and building a reactor or refitting existing reactors to be able to to use this sort of methodology. Um, you have to demonstrate that it's of an incredible value before that becomes you know, economically feasible. Well, and as we mentioned before, part of the value also of a molten salt reactor is that they say that it is much less vulnerable to meltdown right right, right, Yeah, it

would stop the reactor. It wouldn't have the potential to explode the way that. Yeah, essentially, it wouldn't have the potential for the uranium to reach a temperature that the reactor itself would be unable to contain. Um. That's generally, I mean the idea that I get from it. So, uh so it's it's got good potential and you know, it cuts down on waste. So we wanted to talk about another kind of technology. Yeah, this isn't the only technology like this, right that both cuts down on waste

and get something back out of it. Yeah, So so what you're you're referring to, I assume is plasma gasification, which also sounds really cool. These things have great names plasma waste converters. All Right, you know, I write for how stuff works dot com and one of the very first articles I wrote was about how plasma waste converters work. And as a result, I got to actually go and speak with some of the thought leaders in plasma waiste converters.

I got to watch footage. Actually somewhere, I have a piece of slag from a plasma waste converter reaction. You might want to explain what slag is, Yeah, I will, I will, so so alright, So, plasma waste converters are all designed to get rid of garbage and convert it into one of two things. Anything that is non organic, meaning it is not carbon based, gets liquefied. All right. This liquid stuff ends up being inert, so there's not

anything toxic about it. Uh. And when it cools, you know, either if you cool it by air, then it turns into this kind of rocky substance that looks like obsidian or volcanic glass um, And that's the slag. If you cool it in water, by the way, it beats up into little pebbles. And if you run compressed air through it, which I got to see a video of, and boy was that terrifying because it was actually a dude with a hose compressed air, standing next to a stream of

molten slade. I mean it looks like lava as well as like this molten slags pouring out of a spigot and he's blowing compressed air through it, making these these strands of of slag which, when they cool through the air, become this sort of fluffy substance that apparently is incredibly efficient as an in slator. And it also it also floats some water and it soaks up oil. So you could even use this to help soak up oil in an oil spill if you wanted to. It's what was

it called rock wool? That's it. It's all coming back to me. It's been years since I've written this article. But anyway, so this sounds great. I mean, why why don't we have these on every street corner? Well, well, before I even get there, I haven't even gotten to the really cool part yet. Well, I want to know what creates the heat that liquefies this. I haven't gotten to that. Yea, just go John and talk about the other half. I just said the non organic, what about

the organic? That's the question you should be asking questions Okay, here's what happens. The organic stuff, anything that's carbon based, gasifies, so it turns into a gas. That's because the incredible amount of energy you are applying to this stuff in the form of heat, turns it almost instantaneously into gas. Now that gas you can then put through chemical scrubbers. You have to cool it down first. You put it

through a cooling system. So the gas, because the gas is incredibly hot when it when it first goes through the system, you cool it down and in that process you can actually capture some of that heat and turn water into steam and generate electricity that way. But you can also scrub it with other chemicals, removing some of the harmful elements out of it, making it alert. And the rest of what you have left is a synthetic gas that can be used as fuel. So those are

your two outcomes. Is gas that can be used as fuel and inert slag cool stuff. So what makes this heat is a plasma torch, and so plasma is an ionized gas. It's a gas with free roaming ions, so that means electrons are also free roaming in this gas. It burns an incredible temperature. We're talking like surface of

the sun or hotter degrees something like that. Something like that. Yeah, and and at that temperature you're breaking those chemical bonds and that's what's current making everything either melt or gasify again depending upon what it's made out of. So you have to provide energy to the plasma torch so it will maintain this plasma field, this very hot field, and that's what you know, that's what makes this thing go.

You use use the cooling system around the reactor, which again can capture off that heat and use that to help generate electricity. And assuming you have enough carbon material in the garbage that you're processing, you can create enough synthetic gas to act as fuel to run the whole system and even potentially, if you have enough of it, sell electricity back to the grid, So you would actually be generating electricity by not really burning but processing garbage.

It also has a couple of other phases. You usually would um have a phase where you try to retrieve any metal before going through this system, so casting on metal you could actually recycle into other stuff and otherwise it's just gonna melt down. Um, So you would try and have to sort the garbage first, and usually grind

the stuff up. You've got some heavy grinders that grind everything up into little pieces before it gets exposed to the plasma torch, because then you've you've really cut down on all that surface area and make it a lot easier to process it. And reason why they aren't everywhere, Lauren, to get to your question, not gonna answer Joe's question about how it does this is because it's it would

be very expensive to build these things, all right. So building the plant is expensive, you could co locate it at a dump essentially like any place where there's a landfill. You could put it at the landfill. I mean there

it is right there next to its fuel source. And in fact, most of the figures I saw was that once you get to a certain size of a facility for a plasma waste converter plant, you would be able to not only take in all the garbage that was coming in from a community, but in fact start to mine any existing landfills. So in other words, you would take care of the garbage problem and remove the landfills. Eventually, over several decades worth of time, the landfills would get

smaller and smaller until you had reclaimed them. And then the plasma wast facility would just take in incoming garbage. Uh. And it wouldn't produce as much energy at that point obviously, because you know, part of its fuel supplies gone. But in a way, that's a good problem to have because it's taken away this environmental concern that we have. So and in addition to this usable gas that you get from it that you can burn, the slag is also useful, right, yeah,

you can. You can use it as aggregate, you can use it in building materials. You can use it to freak out your co workers if you like. I had a like I said, I had a small sample of this inside a plastic box. And uh, one of our former co workers, his name's John Fuller. He sat next to me at in our cubicles, and I had this little, you know, clear plastic box that had this piece of

what looked like volcanic rock in it. And he picked it up one day and he was looking at the box and I said, yeah, it's slag from from a plasma waist converter. I got it. When I was interviewing the guy who bought this idea up. He says, oh, that's so cool, and he pops the top of it off and puts the rock in his hand like oh what, Oh no, I gotta make some calls like oh no, and he started freaking out like no, I'm just kidding you. Um. But Yeah, for a while there, he thought that he

had excellently unleashed the zombie plague. Yeah, John has moved on to bigger and better things, where hopefully his coworkers don't make him think that he's created the zombie apocalypse. Uh that I just couldn't resist. The other thing I should mention is that plasma waste converters are not the solution to all of our energy problems. They could help offset energy production, but but they wouldn't be producing enough electricity to replace things like, you know, fossil fuels or

solar plants or anything like that. It just would help, of course not. But the point I think we're making here is that every little bit actually does help. Yeah, and it also ends up impacting another problem, the environmental issues of Yeah. Some some of the detractors of it have said that, well what if what if we have these everywhere and then nobody recycles, And I think that that's kind of missing the scope of writing if nobody recycles,

but there the recycling thing. Yeah, that's a weird argument. I can't imagine why you would make that, Like I guess maybe people in Portland. Well, no, I don't know

the economics of it. There may be a reason why recycling is important, like if you want to obviously, if you're converting all these different things to just slag and gas um, there may be materials that we want to keep in quantity if there, If there are, recycling would be important for any material that requires a great deal of energy for us to access or convert into whatever it is we use. So, for example, um glass not a problem. Glass is made out of sand. We have

sand and heat and that's easy to do. So glass. Actually, I've heard lots of arguments that saying that recycling glass actually doesn't make that much sense because the amount of energy needed to recycle the glass is greater than it would be to create new glass. So the better thing to do with glass is not just used it and throw it away, but to reuse. Because we hear about reuse and recycle, this would be a case for reusing.

But things like plastics that's different, you know you or aluminium would be different too, so but again, the facility would would separate some stuff out already, so you know, it's it probably would not remove the necessity for recycling completely, but it would reduce the uh, the importance of it. But we don't have them, so it's kind of a moot point. I mean, there's only a few facilities like this that exist in the world. They do exist there. It's not like this is just in theory. There are

actual plasma waste converters out there. There's just only a few of them. You know. One of the funny things that happens when you start thinking about energy um and efficiency is you can look around the world and you can just see that energy is wasted everywhere. And I'm not talking about just leaving the lights on the kinds of ways that we normally think about wasting in g I'm talking about what happens to the energy, the impact energy when you put your foot down on the floor

and you take a step. Yeah, you're you know, you're not You're not press the keys on your computer, you know, right, you're not doing any useful work, like you're not like things that things that are actually an expensive energy aren't being recaptured in any meaningful way. And uh so what if you could find a way to capture that energy so that all these little things we do throughout the day, but everyone pretty much does them, what if we could recapture that energy and put it to you know, some

other use, like creating electricity. Right, is, people have already thought of doing this kind of thing in cars, right when you have like regenerative breaking, the brakes used to just just wasted energy and yeah, just friction and heat and that's all you would lose, all that enage just

going out the window. But if you have regenerative breaking, the car manufacturers figured out, oh well, we can actually reclaim some of that energy, and you is it for something, right, which means that you extend the battery life of an electric car for example. So it's not that it's not that you're recapturing all the energy that you just used. You can't do that. You're losing some no matter what because entropy holds. But but you can at least extend

the battery life that way by having regenerative breaking. So what if we could do that with ourselves, Like what if we could end up doing it where either we have something that's lining the floors or even in our shoes that could capture this energy. And you found something that was kind of interesting. Um that all has to do with a virus. Yeah, there's a phenomenon piezo or piezo electricity. I call it piezo electric, and everyone else

calls it piezo electric. But you know what, but Jonathan smarter than me, so I can I call it pie pio. I'm just pie electric. I think that electric pie does sound delicious and and zappy. But but anyway, I probably pronounced it correctly, but I'm stubborn and I shall continue to do so. Whatever it really is, piezoelectric energy comes from pressure, right, So anytime you apply pressure to something, there is some kind of energy transfer going on there.

And what if we can harness that energy? Well, it turns out there are ways to do this. Uh. In fact, I think you know, just like scales and stuff use this. And you know, if you look at a time piece that uses a quartz crystal, that's piezo electric prizo electric. It's it's a material that when you compress it, it emits electricity essentially, or if you induce electricity, if you give it electricity, it then vibrates. So it's that relationship there, right,

it's a it's a relationship with mechanical stress and electricity. Yes, it's very good for making my stumbling actually sound smart. So, uh, you can imagine that. Oh, if we could put these generators just everywhere that there's wasted friction, you know, if you put them on stairs, around the soles of your feet or something like this, could you reclaim over time, um the energy costs that it would cost to create them,

and could you could you even get a surplus? And so say I want to put paso or piezo or piezo electric fields on the bottom of my shoes, walk around all day and charge my iPod. Well, it turns out that you might be able to do something like that now. But part of the problem is um creating these things that we haven't reached peak efficiency yet. So at this point, in a lot of cases, it would probably cost more to create one of these and it

wouldn't put off enough electricity. But we're getting better. Also, they tend to involve materials that you don't want to put into consumer electronics UM, like lead and stuff like that generally not good. But the lab that we were looking at figured out a way that you could create a small ocean of viruses, viruses that don't affect humans. Their bacterio phage viruses the bacteria, not people, right, and

so they wouldn't be harmful to you. They they're the kind of viruses that eat the bacteria that's all over the sidewalk, you know, and everywhere. And thirteen specifically is the bacteria phage designation. Wow in thirteen. Yeah, that's I remember that now. It sounds like a British Secret Service does way behind him five. But yeah, So anyway, you can use viruses to generate electricity. They found out you can. You can make a little ocean of these and when

you slap it, they put off electric current. So you connect that your you coat an electrode, exact stuff. Yeah, and every time you apply pressure compression to that electrode, then a little bit of electricity passes through it and

accumulatively the starts to matter. So I mean right, yeah, it's when when you push it once I think I was reading upon it, and it only produces me a quarter of the voltage of a triple A battery, which doesn't sound a lot until you consider the fact that that you just you just made viruses into energy, right, and if you're if you're doing lots of steps, if you're walking a lot, and then you have these in your shoes, then obviously you're going to generate more electricity.

Or if you have this as part of a heavily trafficked area, then you can harness electricity. I mean, you could even in theory, create a highway system in the future that would use something along these lines that could, through the amount of pressure being applied to it when cars are passing over, start to reclaim some of that energy.

If you could paint this film onto a street, then exactly. Yeah. Well, we don't know where it would be efficient in the future to use things like this, and in fact, we don't even know for sure if we can get there, but it's really cool to try. Yeah. The nice thing about discovering things like this is that even if ultimately it turns out that your initial discovery is not applicable in any meaningful way, you can learn other things during that process that end up in forming other processes, so

you make other things more efficient. Even if your initial approach ends up being a bust, you may find other things that help you out in ways that you had not intended when you started out, which is why I love science. I love the idea, and I don't think of sciences having think you will. You'll hear about a scientific study where you thinking like what's the practical application

of the study? And pure science versus technology? And really, yeah, and I think that's the wrong question to ask, because if we only concentrated on things that we thought we're going to have a practical outcome, we would be so far behind where we are today. Today's pure science is tomorrow's technology. That's right. It's ridiculous that would thinking there, Joe, who would have thought that quantum mechanics would ever have

a technological application? You know, a hundred years ago when people were talking about what these strange quantum states um?

But now we're talking about quantum computers and quantum encryption. Yeah, yeah, yeah, there's definitely some emerging technology today that came out of pure science from a hundred years ago, and maybe in another hundred or two hundred years will be saying the same thing about something like string theory, where right now we don't even call that a science, We almost call it a philosophy because there's no way to test it or observe, but who knows, maybe maybe in a hundred

or two hundred years that will be the genesis of something that really changes the world, like the Genesis Project, which is documented in Star Trek two Wrath of con All right, well, let's wrat this up. This is a good discussion about it. And you know, these were just three examples of some of the ways people have found to maximize that electricity generation while minimizing waste. And it's really cool application of ingenuity and technology. I really think

that this is pretty amazing stuff. If you guys have suggestions for future topics for us to cover, I highly recommend you go to our website, it's fw thinking dot com. There you can watch the video series, you can listen to this podcast, you can read the blogs, and you can also connect with us on our various social platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus. And we will talk to you again really soon. For more on this topic in the future of technology, visit forward thinking dot com,

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