Electricity

Commercial power generation is based in spinning a coil of wire inside a magnetic field. That causes the electrons to flow in the copper wire, and those electrons moving in the copper wire is what we know as electricity. We have a few ways of spinning that coil of wire. There's hydroelectric power generation, where the power of flowing water moves what is essentially a propeller, and that turns the coil of wire. Voila: electricity. There's also the use of wind power. Here the wind turns a propeller, which turns the coil of wire, producing the electricity. Then there's the steam approach, which burns something to create steam (at high pressure). Coal, natural gas, wood, old tires, whatever you might have that can generate heat. It lets you produce steam that blows past a propeller that moves a coil of wire inside of a magnet.

Now for the little shocker in this article (no pun intended): nuclear fuel does not directly produce electricity. It produces heat, which is used to produce steam to turn a propeller that moves a coild of wire inside a magnet. All of our advanced technology, seemingly culminating in nuclear technology, and all we use it for is to heat water.

Mind you, it produces a lot of steam for a very long time. A nuclear power plant can produce steam, and as a result power, for a very long time on a comparatively small load of fuel. But from a technology standpoint, that's all that a nuclear power plant is: a giant, high-tech steam boiler.

Fusion power is the next big step for power generation. That will produce vast amounts of energy from a kind of weird hydrogen. And that energy will be turned into electricity by... boiling water. After one hundred years of electrical power generation, we're still boiling water to turn coils of wires inside of magnets. We're very good at doing that now, and power plants that produce thousands of megawatts of power are in constant operation. But that's what most of them do: they boil water.

In my opinion, the neatest things coming down the pike for power generation are solar cells and fuel cells. We've had both of them for almost as long as we've had the wires and magnets approach, but they haven't been as economically feasible.

Solar power works by exposing specially-prepared surfaces to sunlight. Those surfaces passively use the sunlight to create electricity. No moving parts, which is very nice. A solar panel just sits there, producing electricity as long as the sun is shining on it. That's the caveat that has made it a difficult economic proposition; no sunlight, no electricity.

Fuel cells are in the news these days as a possible replacement for the gasoline engine, but fuel cells are far more than that. They are a device for creating electricity. Hydrogen fuel cells take hydrogen fuel, process the fuel in a very special way, ultimately combining the hydrogen with oxygen from the air to generate water and electricity. There are few moving parts inherent in the process, but dealing with hydrogen as a fuel has problems that undoubtedly end up requiring moving parts to solve.

I've been handwaving these technologies only to bring them up and to set them in a spectrum of solutions to the problem of generating electrical power. We rely on little more than steam, water and wind turning a propeller connected to a coil of wire inside a magnet for the vast majority of our electricity. I don't know about you, but I find that pretty amazing.

Me, I'd like to hear that somebody has invented a device that can convert the raw energy from nuclear fission directly into electrons, instead of banging that energy into water molecules to heat them up into steam. That would make it a kind of solar cell for nuclear light. We can make sure a nuclear light shines almost without limit, eliminating the primary deficiency of solar cells, which rely on the sun shining to do their job.