Is there any way we could create an organic/living energy source?

[vi edit]

Ok, bear with me here. I am no scientist, chemist, doctor, or physicist, but I had an idea last night.

visgf and I were talking of some things last night and one of them was the concern of depleting fossil fuels. We were wondering what could be done to replace them.

My suggestion would be to produce some form of living/organic energy souce. What I'm talking about is mimicing the human body and it's cellular properties to make a "living" power generator. By living, I mean that it is made up of organic compounds that are constantly being produced and broke down just like our bodies.

Our bodies use renewable compounds such as calcium, starches, potassium, and oxygen to produce energy in the cells. The energy in the cells then allow muscle to contract and relax.

Is there any way that we can mimic this process to produce an external power source to replace a gasoline engine?

What I'm trying to figure out here is if we can come up with some sort of device that can be fuel off of basically endlessly renewable resources such as starches, sugars, calcium, and others instead of fossil fuels. Also, as a bonus of being fueled off of organic compounds much like our own bodies, instead of producing exhaust/waste much like the smoke from coal, it would produce an organic and biodegradeable waste just like our own bodies.

And no...I'm not under afluence of incohol

 

[JC]

Like in The Matrix?

Maybe some bioengineered simple life forms would be better. The body is perhaps too inefficient.

Lemme take some more acid, I'll get back to you...

 

[ArkAoss]

hmm i've thought about that, i've seen how they can culture cells to grow along certain "scaffoldings" maybe they could modify a cow, so all it had was 2 big muscles that where connected to a crankshaft, or maybe like 6 muscles, and rotate it, but thats too too freaky, a mooing car.. naww/ / ohh i think i gotta go ralph

 

[vi edit]

Sort of I guess. The matrix used electrical impulses to provide energy. I'm thinking more of a kinetic form of energy.

 

[vi edit]

ArkAoss is along the lines that I'm thinking. Many professional sprinters can produce around 5-8 HP, and that is just in a simple test that the human body wasn't really engineered for.

 

[Killbat]

Well, I say, when you break down any of today's renewable energy sources (I include fossil fuels there, it just takes longer ), when all is said and done, it's all solar power. If we can master solar power, all we need to do is find a star to cuddle around.

 

[Lord Evermore]

It could be done, but I don't think we could do it on such a large scale that we could replace fossil or nuclear power sources, at least not right now.

We already have alternatives to fossil fuels though, if people could accept the limitations of them. Electric cars, mass transit (also electric), etc. Also hydrogen fuel cells, which can be recharged with electricity. The alternatives exist, but they're not QUITE ready to be used to completely replace fossil fuels. Some applications still need more power than the alternatives can provide (like, you won't see an electric tractor trailer hauling stuff cross-country anytime soon, or an electric bulldozer).

All that is required for most of these alternatives is cheap electric power, which the western world already has from nuclear power plants, if people would stop trying to keep them from being built. Eventually cold or warm fusion will be created and cheap, safe electric power will be widely available, and third-world countries will even be able to raise their standards of living because of it. And depending on the type of fusion, the only byproduct will be LOTS and LOTS of party balloons... (Helium is the result of hydrogen fusion.)

Don't forget though that fossil fuels technically WERE organic at one time.

Also, in order to create the 'fuel' for these organic generators, we'd have to come up with a way to generate massive amounts of the starches and sugars and stuff that they'd feed on. That'd either have to be from actually growing the stuff (when we can barely grow enough to feed humans in some places) or creating it artificially (which could also be harnessed to feed humans instead of throwing it away on power supply).

I'm not sure if the amount of power generated by organic sources would even ever be enough to make it an efficient process though. Most of our energy input is output as heat, not actual work-doing (which eventually is just heat generated as well). So we'd have to convert it back from heat, and anytime you convert energy you lose a lot of it to inefficiency (especially with heat conversion to other types; heat is the end product of ALL energy transfer or work, eventually).

You couldn't just harness electrical energy directly from things like cells in our bodies of course, since that would kill the organism (the Matrix kind of didn't say exactly how energy was extracted from humans). So pretty much the only way to get energy from organic sources would be to make them produce as much heat as possible, or just make them generate electricity that doesn't DO anything FOR the organism's survival, like harnessing an electric eel.

And you'd have to consider whether the energy output of the organic source is enough to make up for the energy input into the creation of the fuel source. I doubt it would be (since you can't make fuel that's MORE powerful than the amount of energy you're putting into its creation). Fossil fuels are only efficient because we aren't putting energy into creating them, and extracting them from the ground doesn't use as much energy as we get from them.

 

[Windogg]

We can have trillions of hamsters running on wheels driving little generators. They self-replicate exponentially and work for sunflower seeds.

Windogg

 

[ArkAoss]

hmm lord evermore has it simply, but we could engineer these uh "cows" (not that i like to think of freaky mutant cows but thats easy to say) we could engineer the cows to digest the starchs, or we could merge a plant and cow thingy, like a symbiot that would just need sun and water, and instead of uh ferilizer, it would cycle right back in . . . uh woah thats a pretty good idea, gonna hit the sack though folks gnite

 

[Locutus of Board]

You can from me.

Just take my gastric gas and bottle it.

 

[Mday]

vi_edit, yes we can. but it's very expensive. and not much power can be generated.

 

[vi edit]

Thanks for the post Lord E.. We were talking about nuclear energy, and we need to figure out a way for cold fusion to be usable/reliable.

If I'm not mistaken, when the uranium in the nuclear power plant is "spent", it is broken down to plutonium. At this point in time, I don't believe that we have any reactors that can further break down the plutonium, and therefore it is discarded as waste.

Enter cold fusion. Isn't cold fusion taking that plutonium and using it even further? It's been 8 years since I learned about this stuff, so forgive me if I'm incorrect. The "cold" meaning that we don't need a big "bang" like is required to get the uranium to start breaking down.

 

[vi edit]

Windogg, that's been done. Just look how far it got the Geo Metro

 

[rahvin]

Problem with organic methods of engery generation is the amount of area required. For example:

A moden wastewater treatment plant is usually designed as an oxygenated ditch. This ditch is stired and aerobic decay is allowed to occur (aerobic decay has no odor). These system are highly efficient at consumption of the organic compounds and chemical treating is done to kill pathogens and possibly remove other toxins from the water before discharge into a surface water body. There are organic methods of doing all this, it's called a legume pond. For a normal small american town (say 20,000) people, a 1MGD (million gallon a day) oxygen ditch is required and the entire facility will sit on about an acre of land. A legume pond for the same number of people is nearly 50acres and generally requires as much or more maintenance. Not only this but the time to dischage is close to 30 days (averages about 7 days for a oxygen ditch).

In any organic system you run you will have this problem. Life itself requires enough energy that excess energy is very difficult to extract, and to achieve significant volume of energy your facility would need to be HUGE.

Our best bet for renewable energy is, water, wind, solar and fusion. The fossil fuels will last us 200years....

 

[rahvin]

<<If I'm not mistaken, when the uranium in the nuclear power plant is &quot;spent&quot;, it is broken down to plutonium. At this point in time, I don't believe that we have any reactors that can further break down the plutonium, and therefore it is discarded as waste.>>

Breeder reactors use plutonium.

<<Enter cold fusion. Isn't cold fusion taking that plutonium and using it even further? It's been 8 years since I learned about this stuff, so forgive me if I'm incorrect. The &quot;cold&quot; meaning that we don't need a big &quot;bang&quot; like is required to get the uranium to start breaking down.>>

Cold fusion doesn't exist and never has. It was a sham...

 

[yakko]

<< all we need to do is find a star to cuddle around >>


Hey Killbat it is called a Dyson Sphere.

 

[vi edit]

Ah...breeder reactors. That's what I was thinking about. Thanks

Are there any production plants that use the breeder reactor?

 

[Killbat]

I wasn't thinking quite that extreme yakko.

 

[rahvin]

Off the top of my head I'm going to say that 3 breeder reactors are built in the US. I don't think any of them are used for commercial energy generation. (I'm fairly confident there is one at Los Alamos, but I very well could be wrong) Nuclear fission power is dead, it has a very very bad reputation and another nuclear fission plant will never be built in the US. Hell they still don't have a permanent repository for the nuclear waste generated since the 50's! Fusion is the best bet for a nuclear type energy, but scientists don't expect the technoligy to be commercially viable till about 2020. It will probably carry a heavy stigmatism from Fission power too. Further refinement of solar and wind power will contribute massively to energy independence though.

 

[rc5]

Imagine the megafart those bodies could create.

 

[Rakkis]

vi_edit: atomic fussion is the opposite of fission. In fussion, you're taking smaller atoms (i.e. H) and combining them to form larger ones. It would take way too much energy to do it with something as big as plutonium.

 

[Lord Evermore]

Uranium is used in nuclear power plants. When it is split (or 'fissed', in nuclear fission, it creates radioactive lead (or 'depleted uranium'). That and possibly other by-products, I'm not totally sure. But that's basically the waste that has to be disposed of. It can't be further broken down in any way that would yield extra usable energy.

Plutonium isn't still used I think. It may still exist in some nuclear weapons, but only as a detonator for a fusion bomb (although there may be pure 'dirty' nukes still which are pure fission). The plutonium or uranium bomb is encased around the hydrogen portion of the bomb, and detonates with such force that it causes the hydrogen to fuse, which releases the majority of the energy in a nuclear weapon, but the plutonium/uranium fission makes the bomb radioactive still.

Fusion is also the power source of stars. A fusion bomb with a fission detonator creates an analog of solar fusion, but not the same thing exactly. The sun's mass creates so much gravitation pull that the hydrogen at the center is pushed together hard enough to fuse. In a bomb, the fission forces the hydrogen to fuse, but once the fission exhausts itself there isn't anything to make the fusion reaction continue (which is why the atmosphere doesn't burn up by a fusion bomb). In the sun, there's enough gravitational pull that the explosion of fusion doesn't disperse the matter in the sun, so the gravity continues to power the fusion reaction.

The sun and fusion bombs are 'hot' fusion. Scientists have created very shortlived 'cold' and 'warm' fusion, but not a reaction that is sustainable. Cold fusion would be simply the forcing of atoms together so hard that they fuse, which is what a super-collider does, but that's not a sustainable reaction unless you can make the supercollider run continuously, and the power released by that form of fusion isn't enough to provide the power to actually run the collider, so it's no good as an energy source (more energy goes into making it happen than is released by it). Supercolliders can only accelerate small masses to high speed, they can't accelerate enough hydrogen to create a lot of energy.

Warm fusion uses lasers to heat up the atoms, which makes them easier to collide and fuse, however there's still so much power required to generate the laser beams that the output from the fusion isn't enough to make up for it. Plus containment is a bitch.

Fusion in the sun is hydrogen (or technically, just protons since the electrons have been stripped and there aren't really any atoms) into helium. Human's fusion usually uses deuterium or tritium, which is hydrogen with neutrons attached. 'Heavy water' is water molecules which are made of deuterium instead of normal hydrogen which has no neutrons.

 

[ElFenix]

breeder reactors create plutonium (its a man-made element) for use in nuclear weapons. i think its done by using U^235 which is extracted from lumps of uranium, which is mostly U^238. i really have to wonder why people would rather have a coal-fired plant that belches out tons of toxic waste than a nuclear plant, which uses two aspirin tablets of uranium per family per year. hell, the coal probably puts out more radioactive waste, and straight into the atmosphere where we can't get at. at least uranium sits in the reactor the whole time.


anyway, we have a renewable organic energy source. its called corn. you distill methanol from it, the stuff is actually cheaper than gasoline. cars run great on it. thats what the epa's &quot;new gasoline&quot; is mixed with. the reason it costs more at the pump is because the distribution/refining system was set up for the old gas, some stuff needs replaced for the new gas.

 

[vi edit]

my head hurts