“The release of energy from splitting a uranium atom turns out to be 2 million times greater than breaking the carbon-hydrogen bond in coal, oil or wood.”
Tucker’s Terrestrialism and the Technology of Modernity
by Jon Boone
January 24, 2012“The release of energy from splitting a uranium atom turns out to be 2 million times greater than breaking the carbon-hydrogen bond in coal, oil or wood. Compared to all the forms of energy ever employed by humanity, nuclear power is off the scale. Wind has less than 1/10th the energy density of wood, wood half the density of coal, and coal half the density of octane. Altogether they differ by a factor of about 50. Nuclear has 2 million times the energy density of gasoline. It is hard to fathom this in light of our previous experience. Yet our energy future largely depends on grasping the significance of this differential. “
- William Tucker, excerpted from his lecture, Understanding E=MC2
William Tucker has powerfully explained how the future of technologically advanced civilizations depends upon a sophisticated ability to convert the highest energy densities into increasingly denser power performance, and in the process compacting the time and space necessary to do productive work.
In fact, Tucker wrote an excellent book about this, Terrestrial Energy: How Nuclear Energy Will Lead the Green Revolution and End America’s Energy Odyssey. In light of the excerpt from that book recently posted at Master Resource, I thought readers of this forum might find my review from two years ago (see below) of interest, particularly if they have not yet read Tucker’s book.
The Primacy of Energy Density
Rockefeller University’s Jesse Ausubel has demonstrated that the trend in energy usage continues along a decarbonizing trajectory. Improvements in technology combined with a communal desire to live longer and more healthfully have spurred this phenomenon. Given a choice, who wants to live in a town where thousands of chimneys cast off carbon by-products like sulfuric smoke and soot? Civilization will continue decarbonizing apace, whether this aligns with climate change alarmism, or not.
Connected to Ausubel’s idea is Vaclav Smil’s credible proposition that there is a fundamental societal chain reaction cascade involved with discovering energy densities, which then produce greater power densities, each generation of which leads to even greater energy/power densities, in ways similar to that described by Moore’s Law.
For the last 150 years, we have briskly moved beyond wood and wind, fire and horses to harness the energy within the electro-magnetic force that, among other things, generates electricity, which development continues and will become crucially important as science hones in on advancing the potential of nanotechnologies and the capacity of quantum computing, making our digital world seem quaint.
But to really get at energy densities that will empower planetary and interplanetary work, which is what the future will demand, we’ll require the energy of the greatest force we know, the strong nuclear force, the one that binds together the nucleus of atoms. (MasterResource)
Nuclear Technology is going to be a thing of the past as soon as the first fusion generators are up and running. Basically they’re creating a micro-sun that will burn for up to 100 years and will provide enough power that only two plants would be needed to power the entire world. The amount of energy that could theoretically be produced in 1 day is greater than what every nuclear power plant has ever produced combined. The best part is, it’s cleaner than nuclear.