New Material Can Store Vast Amounts of Energy 253
ElectricSteve writes "Using super-high pressures similar to those found deep in the Earth or on a giant planet, researchers from Washington State University (WSU) have created a compact, never-before-seen material capable of storing vast amounts of energy. Described by one of the researchers as 'the most condensed form of energy storage outside of nuclear energy,' the material holds potential for creating a new class of energetic materials or fuels, an energy storage device, super-oxidizing materials for destroying chemical and biological agents, and high temperature superconductors."
Batteries (Score:5, Interesting)
This will be awesome for mobile devices, if they can make it cheap and compact enough.
Re:Batteries (Score:5, Funny)
... compact enough.
funny
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On the face of it, yes, but the problem is that they've said the material is compact. Whether they can make compact batteries and compact, cheap battery chargers is another question entirely. I doubt they can, considering the pressures involved to make the material.
Re:Batteries (Score:5, Interesting)
I wonder, it takes pressures to make diamonds, but the resulting material is not under pressure. I think the correct term is under stress?
So the material might be made by using pressure, but the resulting product is not under pressure stress?
Re:Batteries (Score:5, Informative)
Sorry, I'm too lazy to log in. PhD in materials science, etc.
It's called a metastable state. It is stable because local perturbations to the structure raise the energy. If you heated diamonds up enough, they would turn to graphite because they are not the most stable state of carbon at room temperature and pressure. So, diamonds are "metastable" because they aren't truly "stable" but they also won't change on timescales that we work with due to kinetic limitations. Theoretically the diamonds will eventually become graphite, but the probability is extremely low because the thermal energy isn't high enough to let it move.
Also, where else but the internet do random people with PhDs in materials science happen by these sorts of questions? I am very happy that I can answer your question, because thermodynamics is some of the coolest math I have ever seen.
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Thanks for taking the time to answer!
I had exactly the same "only on the internet" thought while I was reading your reply.
Thanks again.
cheers
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I'm a sysadmin - al your intarwebs are belong to us!
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I dunno. Try coming to the "Cowboy Breakfast"s in Los Alamos. I guarantee that if you strike up a conversation with a random stranger, he or she will have worked on some wacky stuff -- and might even be allowed to talk about it!
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somebody beat you to the punch [imdb.com]
Re:Batteries (Score:5, Funny)
Yes.
This process is known as fire.
Diamonds burn at temperatures comparable to most carbon containing materials (such as wood).
Re:Batteries (Score:5, Informative)
It's not clear to me if they've even got a way of releasing the energy (is the compressed form stable?). If they have, then you're going to have to generate electricity from the mechanical expansion of a solid. The most obvious way we achieve that currently is a coiled spring, which probably won't work in this case.
As the article says, this is basic science.
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I suspect it is completely useless to batteries, unfortunately. To 'charge' the material you need a diamond anvil cell capable of generating a million atmospheres.
It's not clear to me if they've even got a way of releasing the energy (is the compressed form stable?). If they have, then you're going to have to generate electricity from the mechanical expansion of a solid. The most obvious way we achieve that currently is a coiled spring, which probably won't work in this case.
As the article says, this is basic science.
I suspect it is completely useless to batteries, unfortunately. To 'charge' the material you need a diamond anvil cell capable of generating a million atmospheres.
It's not clear to me if they've even got a way of releasing the energy (is the compressed form stable?). If they have, then you're going to have to generate electricity from the mechanical expansion of a solid. The most obvious way we achieve that currently is a coiled spring, which probably won't work in this case.
As the article says, this is basic science.
Not that it's explained but the article says the mechanical energy is stored as chemical energy. Presumably a chemical process could release it but I also assume the material would be consumed. In short it's a fuel not a battery. But there is not enough info to tell.
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Then how would that be useful for storing vast amounts of energy for purposes of using that energy? Either you create very stable structures that cannot be used for energy extraction or you create something that will release that energy.
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Yes, it's quite impossible to have compounds that are stable enough to store energy but, with a little incentive, will release it. Such compounds, fancifully called "fuel" have been demonstrated to be against the laws of physics.
The article isn't clear about what exactly goes on, but it does suggest that the mechanical energy used to compress the stuff is converted into chemical energy held in the bonds. It's possible that those bonds remain somewhat stable at normal pressure. In that case you could prob
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Mechanical energy spent is Force x Distance. A hundred billiion Pascals represents a lot of force, but I doubt the tiny diamond anvil moves very far in creating that force, so I'm guessing that most of the energy stored comes in the form of changed chemical bonds rather than a spring. Just because chemical energy is formed under great pressure doesn't mean it will necessarily release when the pressure is removed. As other posters point out, diamonds do not spontaneously decompose, even though it takes gr
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If you compress some coal into a diamond form, sure, you have created very dense material, but you just lost ability to burn that coal for energy and diamond also is not about to 'spring out' and release any energy mechanically either'. The claim is that the compressed energy can be released, that why the entire 'New Material Can Store Vast Amounts of Energy' is supposedly interesting. If it was 'New Material Can Store Vast Amounts of Energy that Cannot Be Released' it wouldn't have been as interesting, w
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Not sure what your point is. A diamond can burn too, so basically, yes, you can get that energy back that way at least. Given the same amount of oxygen and the same amount of resulting CO2, the difference in energy released in burning 1kg of diamonds and 1kg of graphite will reflect exacly the difference in their bonding energy.
Practically all forms of storing energy in molecular bonds can have that energy released by chemical means, one way or another. E.g., hydrazine requires a lot of energy to produce, a
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So, in your world diamonds spontaneously become a pile of graphite?
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But the story is about 'store of vast amount of energy'. Do we extract energy from the diamonds?
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You can if you burn them, same deal with this stuff. I also assume that most of the energy that goes into it from the press would radiate away as heat pretty quickly anyway, much the same as when you hammer a nail into wood the head of the nail becomes hot enough to burn your finger. Interesting stuff but totally impractical for "energy storage".
Re:Batteries go BOOOOOOOOM! (Score:5, Insightful)
- Energy storage for renewable to allow baseline operation
- Car fuel that only needs to be refilled monthly
- Backup generators that don't require huge fuel tanks
You never want to start small with new technology. Remember the problem with exploding Nokia's? I would not let a higher energy density version near my head until it's been tested in practice for years, no need to nuke my own head off...
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My car already only needs to be refilled monthly...
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Not my '91 Corolla.
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This will be awesome for mobile devices, if they can make it cheap and compact enough.
Unless it weights 1kg/cm3
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Dark matter [wikia.com]?
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So, how do one extract the energy? (Score:5, Insightful)
They can store, but how do one extract the energy ?
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Well, it's a metal... so I'm gunna take a wild guess and say electricity might flow through it.. that's all I've got.
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When I was a kid, one could throw a AA battery against the ground, real hard, and have a roughly 25% chance of it going bang, releasing all the energy at once. At least I assume that was what powered the small explosion. The cheap Chinese ones that sometimes came with toys had a much higher explosion rate. It was like getting free firecrackers with every battery powered toy.
Not what you had in mind though, I suspect.
My guess would be a chemical reaction that cracked the material into component materials, re
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that will it be: you crank it up and let the clockwork drive your car!
That is always the trickey part (Score:3, Interesting)
I think some folks forget that we already have some things with amazing energy densities out there. Semtex would be a good example. It is stable, moldable, and stores a whole lot of energy. However, the way it releases its energy is as an explosion, it is a plastic explosive. Well that makes it not so useful as a battery. For batteries, you want a slow release of energy, and you want that energy in an electrical form, of course. We have all kinds of substances with high energy densities, but that doesn't me
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Re:That is always the trickey part (Score:5, Informative)
Yes they did. C4 burns.
It won't go off without a detonator. They also use C4 on some mortar bombs as propellant (the U.S. made ones). On the tubes I am familiar with (60mm and 81mm) the bombs (whether U.S. or made elsewhere) all have something akin to a shotgun charge (sans the shot) and a primer to set it off located at the very bottom of the bomb in the round tube structure that the bomb's fins are attached to. (This is all well known to anyone who has ever fired a mortar in any country they are found... so I'm not helping anyone's enemies.) On the U.S. made bombs, small pieces of C4 are (or at least were when I was a mortarman) clipped to the fins of the bombs (there are several)( All mortars work essentially the same way, the only real difference being what the manufacturer uses as the charges on the fins).
Depending on how far you need the bomb to go (range), you either leave all the C4 charges (or whatever your bomb comes with) attached or remove a number of them as determined by a person responsible for taking the remote fire controller's (a person like a forward observation officer (FOO... who may be an NCO too)) fire mission data (coordinates of target etc) and converting it into bearings, elevations, and charge number for the mortarmen. If you really need a little extra distance it has been known to pour a little naphtha down the tube in emergency situations... not exactly recommended procedure.
Once the fire missions for a location are complete, you are generally left with a good number of these C4 charges (about an inch square, and maybe an eighth of an inch thick, wrapped in cellophane). When I say a good number, a mortar group (four mortars) can rack up a big pile a foot high or more, depending on how long they are at a location. Periodically, or when leaving, someone will take the charges and put them in a narrow, long, low pile, with a much much smaller trail of them leading off. They will ignite the smaller end of the trail and they will burn like a fuse to the pile. Then the pile burns like a son of a bitch with a lot of heat. I have seen this many times. It doesn't explode. If we had been so inclined, we could have indeed taken some of the charges and cooked with them. However didn't do this since we had stoves and it was expedient to make sure that there wasn't a whole bunch of uncontrolled C4 laying around in someone's kit (what grunts are fond of playing with isn't something you necessarily want lying around... even in a grunts hands :) ). So we always burned all the unused pieces.
As a note, even the bombs are pretty damned stable (doesn't mean I would be comfortable seeing someone drop one... but if you're closer than say 30 or 40 metres, don't bother to run if you do see this (drop to the ground maybe)... you won't make it far enough away to matter if it does go... so might as well watch the show until its errrr over). The fuses are designed not to be completely armed until they have undergone the rapid acceleration of being fired and have actually cleared the tubes. This is why some movies who have people throwing mortar bombs off of buildings at enemies have the characters bang the bottom of the bomb on the ground before throwing them over the edge... but I'm not sure if that would really be hard enough... and THAT would make ME nervous... unlike burning small pieces of C4. If you see a movie where someone might try to use a mortar bomb, even a small one (e.g. 60mm) like a grenade at ground level... it is just a movie.... I'm not sure you could throw one far enough to stay out of its kill radius even if you got it to work. Guys running through exploding shells in movies pisses me off... the scene in Band Of Brothers when they are in the forest during the Battle of the Bulge... where trees are being shredded and people are vapourized... that is closer to the truth. Also... I'm not sure I would feel all that comfortable burning a 1kg chunk of C4 (that is the size we used to blow dud grenades, bombs, and artillery shells with).
Artillery
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>the scene in Band Of Brothers when they are in the forest during
>the Battle of the Bulge... where trees are being shredded and people
>are vapourized... that is closer to the truth
While I am not disputing what you are saying, I believe shelling can also be hugely ineffective. In Fred Bridgland's book A War for Africa [amazon.com] he tells of how South African G5 (155 mm) shells were unable to injure or kill enemy soldiers if landing more t
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I think you should revise the "C4 won't go off without a detonator" bit.
Former military here, and I gotta say that if you burn some and try to put it out by stomping on it, you'll be missing a foot.
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Energy density? (Score:4, Interesting)
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one more turn and you create a black hole!
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it's almost like a gasoline engine running in reverse!
Crap. Most people don't know how to parallel park any more much less going in reverse down the highway. May as well file this invention with personal jetpacks and flying cars.
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Indeed the linked article (I actually read it) only mentions that this material can store mechanical energy - it doesn't give any hints on practical ways of getting the energy in (such high pressures are not easy to get to), and not a single hint on how it could be possible to get the energy out in a controlled way.
Just one thing (Score:5, Funny)
Using super-high pressures similar to those found deep in the Earth or on a giant planet
In other words, it's unobtanium [wikipedia.org].
Proof Of The Science News Cycle! (Score:5, Insightful)
Hahaha.. this so reminds me of this [phdcomics.com].
Folks, what they've done is make Xenon Octa-fluoride, which is an order of magnitude harder than the previously created Xenon Tera-fluoride.
As cool as it is that some chemists have managed to make a new compound that had only been theorized before, it's not enough for the drooling media. So they try to explain why it is remotely relevant and interesting, and the media replies with this sort of gross stupidity.
Science reporting at its finest.
Re:Proof Of The Science News Cycle! (Score:5, Insightful)
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give. it. time.
Re:Proof Of The Science News Cycle! (Score:4, Insightful)
Yes, but phdcomics missed one important step in the science news cycle: where the researcher himself wracks his brain to come up with some speculative practical application to justify his next grant.
Ideally, every grant should have a section, "How this discovery will help the war against terror (if we get more money)."
Back in the cold war, every grant had a section, "How this discovery will help the war against Communism (if we get more money)."
Then comes the section, "How this discovery will help the war against cancer (if we get more money)."
Since the investigator is supposed to review every press release for accuracy, phdcomics can't blame the university PR office too much.
Not that I have any objection. I'd rather see money spent on useless basic science than on war.
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here's a link to the actual journal article (abstract only, need to pay for fulltext)
http://www.nature.com/nchem/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nchem.724.html [nature.com]
Or
http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/nchem.724 [doi.org]
you've got it spot on. it's a neat new material. no mention of applications anywhere in the abstract, where people will often at least hint of an application if they've got a concrete one to sell.
Finally (Score:5, Insightful)
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You only get to that pressure if you have a diamond anvil. If you want to store enough to power a car you will need one hell of an anvil.
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You only get to that pressure if you have a diamond anvil. If you want to store enough to power a car you will need one hell of an anvil.
I can see a remake of "diamonds are forever" coming.
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Awesome for terrorists.
But if it could be made safe it would be interesting to use in cars and other vehicles.
XeF2 - are they crazy? (Score:3, Insightful)
XeF2 produces _atomic_ fluorine during decomposition. Just thinking about it makes me shiver.
Re:XeF2 - are they crazy? (Score:5, Interesting)
There's people playing with a lot nastier compounds out there...
http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/things_i_wont_work_with/
Dioxygen Difluoride is one of the more spectacular WTF, another "favorite" is chlorine trifluoride which is hypergolic with lots of things including ordinarily benign materials such as sand!
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Waaaah! Just reading about FOOF made me cringe. It's even worse than watching horror films.
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XeF2 produces _atomic_ fluorine during decomposition. Just thinking about it makes me shiver.
The best thing is that Xenon is a general anaesthetic, and Fluorine is a local anaesthetic.
That's a great combo for consumer gear!
You won't even feel it when you die!
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What seems even crazier to me is that they start off with XeF2, then go to XeF4 and end up with XeF8.
In a closed system.
Where does the extra F come from, or where does the excess Xe go? Same issue when going in the opposite direction.
What next? (Score:5, Funny)
the most condensed form of energy ... (Score:2)
Re:the most condensed form of energy ... (Score:4, Insightful)
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Yes, I feel perfectly safe. The energy is just as dangerous as the vast amounts of nuclear energy stored in the atomic nuclei of the apple sitting on my desk.
For a second there, I imagined a guy in a radiation suit; next to his mouse, a apple, green glow pulsating on phase with a deep buzzing sound.
Don't read too much into this... (Score:5, Interesting)
I used to study batteries and capacitors and the like in relation to energy storage, and one interesting comment I heard once was that storage utilising only chemical or electromagnetic methods cannot store more energy in a given lump of matter than the energy contained in its chemical bonds, otherwise the stored energy exceeds the "binding strength" of the substance, and it's liable to either leak the energy, not accept any more, or even explode.
This is true of even things like Ultracapacitors or flywheel storage, both of which have similar issues with breakdown largely caused by limited bond strength, despite neither using chemical energy storage.
This kind of "high pressure storage" seems to break this rule if you consider only the compressed material itself as the storage medium. If you factor in the anvil generating those pressures, then you'll find that the total system is probably quite bad at energy storage per kg of matter. There's no escaping this.
The pressure they were using is over 100GPa (1 million atmospheres), which is notably higher than the highest tensile strength of carbon nanotubes ever measured! There's no chance in hell that a practical container could be made to contain a material at those pressures. First of all, it would have to be atomically perfect, and second, it would violently explode if it received the slightest damage!
What the article was saying is that some of the energy imparted by the compression was stored as chemical energy. This is all fine and good, but I guarantee that if the pressure is lowered, that energy is released, and none of it can be stored at normal pressures.
Trust a dumbass journalist to rewrite that to mean that suddenly our electric cars will be powered by Xenon Fluoride compressed by diamond anvils, even though the original research paper doesn't mention anything of the sort!
Re:Don't read too much into this... (Score:4, Informative)
Trust a dumbass journalist to rewrite that to mean that suddenly our electric cars will be powered by Xenon Fluoride compressed by diamond anvils, even though the original research paper doesn't mention anything of the sort!
It wasn't the journalist who wrote the bit about "potential for creating a new class of energetic materials or fuels, an energy storage device, super-oxidizing materials for destroying chemical and biological agents, and high temperature superconductors," it was the university PR office. http://www.wsunews.wsu.edu/pages/Publications.asp?Action=Release&PublicationID=20580 [wsu.edu] The researcher reviews and approves the press release before the university sends it out.
So you can trust the dumbass scientist to hype his research in the hope of getting more funding.
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You're neglecting the possibility for the material being its own container on molecular level.
Imagine a crystal of structure similar to graphite - layers of fairly dense material separated by wide distances. It is normally moderately brittle and low-energy. Now assume this crystal has no electric connection between the layers but the layers themselves are conductive. Apply altering charge to each of them. The thing becomes a capacitor with each layer pulled closer to the next. The bonds between layers get c
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Except that if the alternating layers have opposite charges, those charges set up an electric field, which will pull electrons from one side to another, and the charges cancel. There doesn't need to be a "connection", the electrons will cross the space between the layers anyway.
If you place an insulator between the layers, then you've just invented a garden variety capacitor, but the problem remains: with sufficient charge, the electric field between the layers will exceed the breakdown voltage of the insul
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This results in roughly 80 farads.
Which says nothing about the power stored without the voltage across the planes!
W = C V^2 / 2
The energy stored goes as the square of the voltage. It drops precipitously as the voltage approaches 0, as it does in this case.
Even if you somehow managed to get 100mV of potential difference*, that's still only 800 mJ of stored energy, or about 2kJ/kg specific energy. Compare that to just burning the graphite at 32.8 MJ/kg (not counting the weight of the oxygen), which is about 16,000
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. . . it would violently explode if it received the slightest damage!
Not necessarily
The mechanical stresses from great pressures will not cause much movement when decompressed, and so will not create an explosion, if the substance is very stiff (which is a reason liquids rather than gases are often preferred fluids for high pressure testing of piping systems)
The stored chemical bonding energy will not be explosively released by "the slightest damage" if the substance is metastable. (see other posters' comments about diamonds)
New Material *Can* Store vasts amounts of energy (Score:3, Funny)
So, considering it "CAN", but not necessarily does store it, does that mean they're having some motivational issues with this material?
Will this evolve into chemical psychology?
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Yes...and we already know that the materials won't perform as well if they're all doped up.
Trioculans puperonium (Score:2)
Useless for practical applications... (Score:5, Informative)
The substance is not stable when the pressure is released - it immediately decomposes. Carrying around the whole set-up where the typical payload (i.e. the compressed substance) is maybe 0.1% of the total weight of the apparatus is of course impractical. Also, this kind of high-pressure research is not exactly new. There are many published similar experiments where compounds undergo interesting crystal structure changes at ultra-high pressures. Nevertheless, bond strenghts limit what extra energy you can store in crystal structure variants. Xe-F bonds are definitely not among the strongest.
Currently, the only remotely realistic method for radical improvements in stored energy per weight are metastable isotopes, but even that is a far shot.
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Currently, the only remotely realistic method for radical improvements in stored energy per weight are metastable isotopes, but even that is a far shot.
The only reason you're saying that is because we aren't currently facing an imminent extinction event that can be cured with a bit of metastable isotopic unobtainium. If Hollywierd has taught us anything, it's that nothing is impossible in the face of an imminent extinction event. It seems to be the only way to get those evil scientists to share their horded knowledge.
Man, I don't know about this summary (Score:2)
From the summary, as best I can tell, we have invented Energon cubes. Drink it up, Autobots.
gizmag? (Score:2)
Someone tell me I'm not the only one questioning that "magazine" title. Do they mention super-strong glues anywhere, or can no one get those html pages apart to read them?
Red Mercury? (Score:2)
Anyone else reminded of that mythical, conspiracy-nut material from Russia that is supposed to be able to set off thermonuclear reactions without a fission primary? Imagine if you had a pellet of lithium deuteride, surrounded by a sphere of this stuff, then imploded with high explosives...
Of course, the actual research doesn't suggest anything nearly that exciting (and if it did, I doubt it would get published in Nature...) - its just the press release being a bit overzealous as usual.
I can't wait to see (Score:2)
Biosprings (Score:2)
Shipstone quote from Robert Heinlein's Friday (Score:4, Interesting)
-thus young Daniel Shipstone saw at once that the problem was not a shortage of energy but lay in the transporting of energy. Energy is everywhere-in sunlight, in wind, in mountain streams, in temperature gradients of all sorts wherever found, in coal, in fossil oil, in radioactive ores, in green growing things. Especially in ocean depths and in outer space energy is free for the taking in amounts lavish beyond all human comprehension.
Those who spoke of "energy scarcity" and of "conserving energy" simply did not understand the situation. The sky was "raining soup"; what was needed was a bucket in which to carry it.
With the encouragement of his devoted wife Muriel (nee Greentree), who went back to work to keep food on the table, young Shipstone resigned from General Atomics and became the most American of myth-heroes, the basement inventor. Seven frustrating and weary years later he had fabricated the first Shipstone by hand. He had found-What he had found was a way to pack more kilowatt-hours into a smaller space and a smaller mass than any other engineer had ever dreamed of. To call it an "improved storage battery" (as some early accounts did) is like calling an H-bomb an "improved firecracker." What he had achieved was the utter destruction of the biggest industry (aside from organized religion) of the western world.
For what happened next I must draw from the muckraking history and from other independent sources as I just don't believe the sweetness and light of the company version. Fictionalized speech attributed to Muriel Shipstone:
"Danny Boy, you are not going to patent the gadget. What would it get you? Seventeen years at the most. . . and no years at all in threefourths of the world. If you did patent or try to, Edison, and P. G. and E., and Standard would tie you up with injunctions and law suits and claimed infringements and I don't know what all. But you said yourself that you could put one of your gadgets in a room with the best research team G.A. has to offer and the best they could do would be to melt it down and the worst would be that they would blow themselves up. You said that. Did you mean it?"
"Certainly. If they don't know how I insert the-"
"Hush! I don't want to know. And walls have ears. We don't make any fancy announcements; we simply start manufacturing. Wherever power is cheapest today. Where is that?"
The Shipstone complex is mammoth, all right, because they supply cheap power to billions of people who want cheap power and want more of it every year. But it is not a monopoly because they don't own any power; they just package it and ship it around to wherever people want it. Those billions of customers could bankrupt the Shipstone complex almost overnight by going back to their old ways-burn coal, burn wood, burn oil, burn uranium, distribute power through continent-wide stretches of copper and aluminum wires and/or long trains of coal cars and tank cars.
But no one, so far as my terminal could dig out, wants to go back to the bad old days when the landscape was disfigured in endless ways and the very air was loaded with stinks and carcinogens and soot, and the ignorant were scared silly by nuclear power, and all power was scarce and expensive. No, nobody wants the bad old ways-even the most radical of the complainers want cheap and convenient power. . . they just want the Shipstone companies to go away and get lost.
"The people's right to know"-the people's right to know what? Daniel Shipstone, having first armed himself with great knowledge of higher mathematics and physics, went down into his basement and patiently suffered seven lean and weary years and thereby learned an applied aspect of natural law that let him construct a Shipstone.
Any and all of "the people" are free to do as he did-he did not even take out a patent. Natural laws are freely available to everyone equally, including flea-bitten Neanderthals crouching against the cold.
In this case, the trouble with "the people's right to know" is that it strongly resembles the "right" of someone to be a concert pianist-but who does not want to practice.
But I am prejudiced, not being human and never having had any rights.
Re:Extreme (Score:5, Funny)
pressures similar to those found deep in the Earth or on a giant planet What could possibly go wrong? (Also, FP?)
There could be an explosion that wipes out a city when some idiot tries to open it to get the watch batteries out of it.
Re:Extreme (Score:5, Funny)
Damnit, it's his watch that he paid for with his money, he can do whatever he wants with it since he owns it! So what if he wants to dual boot linux on his watch and run Apache from it while torrenting the latest American Idol, it's his right!
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Some kid with a genius father, and an idiot mother? Such a person would be a half-breed, and hence a half wit!
And, no, I don't think it would work the other way around. A genius mother wouldn't be fertile for an idiot father - you couldn't even get an infertile idiot offspring (or, mule) from that match up.
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Gentlemen, we have our next President.
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Nahhh - I can't do that. See, there really is a God. And, God put me on earth just to punish people like you, and the Anonymous Coward who called me "Annoyingly assertive". You hate me, but that is my purpose in life - to be hated by the wishy-washy liberal crowd, and the self-sure ultra-conservatives alike. It's a tough job, but SOMEONE has to do it!
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A hacker who's lost the remote?
Weapon? (Score:2)
There could be an explosion that wipes out a city when some idiot tries to open it to get the watch batteries out of it.
Speaking of explosions that wipe out cities ... I'm surprised summary nor posts I've seen so far have noted the potential for a weapon. Anything that stores energy in a compact form has the potential to release a lot of energy all at once. (Or if it was somehow impossible for the energy to get out so fast, this could be a useful military power source, for powering lasers or other high-energy destructive applications)
Re: (Score:2)
You mean like lead? [looks at pencil on desk, realizes huge threat of all that graphite] TERRORISTS!
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
First thing I thought of was Heinlein's Shipstone. [blogspot.com] That too would blow up if anyone tried to disassemble it, ensuring the Shipstone Corporation a virtual monopoly on the assembly process, without the tedium of a patent.
Re:Extreme (Score:5, Insightful)
I was thinking, how much energy is needed to create this material ? Because if you need 1000000x the energy to store a little it's probably not as useful.
The pressure is used in a plant to create the material, the safety very much depends on how they apply that pressure. Also you could put it in the desert somewhere if that would make you feel safe.
Re:Extreme (Score:4, Insightful)
Actually, it can still be very useful. The advantage of a battery is not only that it can store energy, but also makes it transportable. This would be very useful to move an energy source to a location where power generation is not (easily) possible.
Consider how solar cells, even though they might cost more energy to make than they will ever supply during their lifetime are still very useful powering a communication satellite. In the same way, this material might be interesting to send to outer space, or as power supply in other very remote locations.
Re: (Score:2)
I was going to post essentially what you said, but 1 million times the energy makes it somewhat less useful (lets assume that 1 million wasn't an exaggeration pulled out of the air). To make a comparison, a 1000mAh AA battery has enough energy (theoretically) in it to run a device at 1A x 1.2V for 1 hour, so in order to charge this new material to the equivalent amount of energy, you'd need to pump 1000A at 1200V into it for 1 hour (or 1000000A at 1.2V etc, but you get the idea). And then what are you going
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
and the excess heat can be used to heat water to run turbines, and collect some of the energy pack :) Still inefficient, but does collect some of the waste back into use.
Re:Extreme (Score:4, Interesting)
Even though solar panels make MANY TIMES more energy than it takes to build them, comparing input energy to delivered electricity is an apples-oranges comparison, for several reasons. Among them:
- Much of the energy needed to make the cells is raw heat (for things like melting the glass and metal that make up its housing). You'd be a fool to use solar electricity for smelting - paying a carnot cycle penalty.
- The job is delivering electricity in usable form to a particular location. The main competitor is the power grid. Power grids consume considerably more energy than they deliver, largely from carbon-emitting fossil fuel or nuclear reactions, on an ongoing basis. It's called "less than perfect efficiency". Solar panels consume only sunlight. Power grids also take energy - and other valueable stuff - to build: Energy to make the transformers, wire, insulators, poles, generators, boilers, switches, meters. Energy to clear a path and install them, take workers to and from the site. Trees to make poles. Land to be dedicated to power lines for lifetimes. I could go on.
There are many things of value involved in making solar power installations and power grids. Price is a good way of summarizing a basket of costs to human value. So as a first approximation when solar power is more affordable than grid power it's approximately less damaging to and consumptive of things people value.
As of about ten years ago Solar power was past cost break-even only for situations where the cost of a grid hookup was high: New construction in remote areas where the cost of running grid power was several grand, or small loads distant from a plug-in (road signs, emergency telephones, decorative yard lighting, ...) Recently, even without government subsidies, it has been approaching price break-even for sunny suburban locations.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
"You'd be a fool to use solar electricity for smelting"
Hi, we have this thing called electromagnetic induction. We can use solar as the source of required energy and we have used it for smelting ALL THE TIME.
Dunno (Score:5, Insightful)
Dunno... If you need 1000000x the energy, but the result can be detonated and actually release more energy per kilo than a nuke (and a cloud of atomic fluoride is just icing on the cake too), the military would drool all over it. In fact, someone probably already came in his pants reading this news.
To put it into perspective, the Manhattan Project has cost the equivalent of 20 billion 1996 dollars. (Or about 30 billion in todays dollars.) The power used by the Oak Ridge facility alone to separate the uranium that went into one of the bombs (the other was plutonium) used 10% of the total electricity produced in the USA at the time.
Compared to the modest yield of the first nukes, they genuinely pumped orders of magnitude more energy in, than they got out.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
it seems that the basic idea is things like levers to apply force and all that force is concentrated to the point of a diamond that is well, pointy, and very small. kinda along the lines of '3mph ain't bad when its a pillow to the face, but it really sucks when its the tip of a sword'
dial 9 chevrons and planet blows up! (Score:2)
dial 9 chevrons and planet blows up!
Adamantite! (Score:2)
Because Earth is a Giant Planet if you're a Dwarf!
Re: (Score:2)
One post on Slashdot makes the lawyers mumble
I can feel the **AA walking next to me
Re:The grail of energy storage... (Score:4, Interesting)
... AND if that energy can be reasonably released. Gasoline, for example, contains about 45 MJ / kg (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Energy_density.svg) -- all you need is a 3 liter bottle of it on your desk. It'll be physically stable for a good long time. But you need a large, wasteful engine to release it.