The Future of Clean Energy: Crash Course Engineering #31
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- Опубликовано: 18 июн 2024
- This week we are exploring alternative energy sources. We'll look at how biomass can be burned as a fuel source, how hydrogen can be used in a fuel cell to generate electrical power, and how nuclear fission provides power to the grid. We'll also discuss how nuclear fusion might someday do the same without any radioactive waste.
Crash Course Engineering is produced in association with PBS Digital Studios: • All PBS Digital Studio...
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I'm glad you're discussing the future of engineering as well as what is currently happening in the field. Crash Course videos always go the extra mile and I greatly appreciate that!
Indeed they do.
I'm glad you mentioned nuclear energy, but it's not enough, nuclear energy is our best hope for a sudden shift from fossil fuels
Nafrost Nuclear is not that safe ☢️
I think it's at least according to the kurzgesagt videos, I watched all three of them, and I think that it is great, according to those videos.
Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactors don't produce radioactive waste, and can even consume radioactive "waste" as fuel. I'm sure many would enjoy a deep dive video on nuclear fission, including the deaths per TW/h compared to all other sources of energy.
Nitpick Alert: They do produce radioactive waste. Any way to produce nuclear energy does. The main advantage of using Thorium as fuel is that you only get fission products (and irradiated parts of the reactor), which decay to safe levels in a few hundred years. Putting Uranium into the reactor will also breed lots of heavier elements that take a few hundred *thousand* years to decay - and it is quite a challenge to store anything safely for ten times as long as the whole known history of mankind.
Using molten salt reactors (not LFTR, you're not using Thorium in that case) to turn long-term radioactive transuranic waste into short-term radioactive fission products is a pretty good idea - the technology isn't quite there, yet, though. The physics are solved, but engineering is a female dog.
With the current political climate, no one in the western world is likely to put in the amount of money it would take, and risk that another nuclear disaster like Fukushima would swing public opinion against nuclear energy and sink the whole project before it makes any profit (China, OTOH, doesn't give a damn about public opinion).
@@autolykos9822 lol nitpick is right
I agree
I'm surprised breeder reactors weren't brought up- in terms of long term energy, that's the way to go, as far as nuclear is concerned. Because they can convert that relatively useless U-238 into useful fissionable material, they're efficient and massively reduce the amount of nuclear waste and even the time that waste has to wait before becoming decently harmless. See EBR-II and the IFR concept for examples of practical, safe breeder reactors.
Man, they spent less than 5 minutes on nuclear energy. They didn't bring up a lot of stuff. These videos aren't comprehensive, and the details of breeder reactors are beyond the scope of these videos.
same surprise as to why thorium wasn't brought up either
"Yesterday's home runs don't win today's games." --Babe Ruth :)
Really interesting, always really informative and in depth videos! There surely are technologies that we can not yet even imagine for generating energy, and as our technology is advancing exponentially, it is interesting to see more and more different and creative ways of producing energy from bacteria to ever more innovative forms of renewable energies.
I’m a strong believer in renewable sources of energy. It might not be now , but maybe perhaps for our children’s children’s , and the ones after that that will face the consequences for our actions. Global warming and climate change is real. Our fossil fuel will not be there forever, I hope that us the people, governments and corporations of the world will action to it and create the change we need by progressing to renewable sources of energy!
How are you planning on dealing with the intermittency problem? Batteries are too expensive; pumped hydro is too inefficient (both in terms of energy and land area).
King Dang Our grand children's generstion will be far past the point of no returen for the human races destruction of the planets eco-system and balance
kokofan50 capacitor battery are being worked on, they can be both cheap and more efficient.
kugreymon, lots of things are being worked on. We need something that works today.
Agree but honstley I don't have a lot of hope, the west and east hate each other, and toogher the US, Russia' and China spends close to a trillion dollars on thier millatries, with the US spends most of that.
So cool to watch this now that scientists HAVE been able to produce more energy then is consumed via fusion.
LOVE U CRACHCOURSE , BEST CHANNEL.
Wish you guys would have touched on molten salt reactors like the MSBR in Oak Ridge just to see your thoughts on them.
Great job as always .It is a sincere request, can you also make courses on geography , musical revolution.😊
Why not talk about thorium reactors and molten salt reactors? Way safer than uranium and already being used.
Yeah and someone is already developing a TWR which would be able to Burn Natural or Depleted Uranium without a Chance of Containment Breaches
When talking about fission it would’ve been good to include the unbelievably high energy density of Uranium that easily outweighs the cost and CO2 of extraction and purification process
uranium 235 is found mostly in Canada
Love how clean nuclear energy was talked about. Is not discussed as a viable source nowadays even though France is nearly 100% nuclear
France is NOT 100% nuclear...
It produces around 70% of the electricity which only amounts to 38% of its energy...
Kiki Pruvost so?
True.... I'm just a bit tired of hearing that France is 100% nuclear, they are just as fossil fuels dependent as any other countries.
If we're looking for real solutions to prevent financial collapse it should not be used as an example...
@@christophe6926 As a German what worries me more is that France tended to build its reactors on its eastern borders. Since the wind in these parts tends to blow west to east, that sends a pretty clear message....
@@Alexander_Kale well I'm from Switzerland so I'd suffer from the same consequences if anything happened... But if you check the UNSCEAR report you'd realize you probably don't risk much from nuclear radiation as long as you're not in the direct area.
Therefore what worries me even more is Germany replacing it's nuclear reactors with coal factories! Those definitely have a terrible impact on your health, yet no one seems to care about them....
Beautiful x
Love the graphic on nuclear waste, there's a copy of Fallout 76 in the barrel.
While I am very interested in the forthcoming storage instalment, I mainly wish to make mention that the augmented reality poster looks staggeringly dynamic!
Another interesting thing about hydrogen is that it can be used in multiple applications. One idea floating around is to use hydrogen generated during electricity surpluses to blend with natural gas. H2 can be blended to about 20% in natural gas, without really affecting any of the end use appliances. So the natural gas grid can be used as a battery for the electrical grid.
Given enough financial backing, you could easily have 1 big coastal plant complex that:
- uses hydrogen fuel cells and biogas turbines to run the plant.
- hydrogen is collected from seawater using electrolysis.
- Wastewater is collected. The incoming flow of wastewater is also energy for the plant to collect.
-solid/insoluble waste is filtered out and burned in a biomass boiler. This can be used to heat the digesters, the central heating of offices and/or preheat water to improve efficiency of biogas turbine power. The ash produced can be collected for building/composting.
- The wastewater is then condensed and digested to produce biogas. The biogas can power the plant and/or be distributed for other services.
-the inert sludge from biogas production can be distributed for agriculture.
- The separated water from the refuse is then treated with the biproduct of the electrolysis (sodium hypochlorite) until it is safe enough to be redistributed to the public (grey water supply) for flushing toilets and agriculture. Excess chemical can be distributed for other services.
-The hydrogen produced by the electrolysis can also power the plant by HFC use or distributed. The biproduct being distilled water. This can be distributed to the public also with the treated wastewater, where it can remineralise through the ground and return to water courses, or top up the water supply used to distribute heat around the premesis and run the turbines.
A plant like this would then be beneficial in which:
-the abundance of seawater is converted indirectly into useable fresh water. Improving available water resources.
-Wastewater is treated and redistributed in a cost neutral fashion, also improving available water resources.
-Soil quality is vastly improved.
-Useable gas and electricity is created in vast abundance. Enough to run the plant and sell for profit.
-almost no resources need to be brought in to maintain the process.
Opinion with intro (for visualization): china recently completed buildings that use the changing pressure and properties of energy flow to produce energy, meaning they also recycle energy, which is neither destroyed, and save for long enough waves is forced to gradually leave an area after consumed. By cycling the same energy through the lines while the sun keeps shining, the "energy balance" might reach potential even fusion cannot offer.
The biggest setback in nuclear power is the public's perception and the up front cost.
A small nitpick, but oxygen producing organisms did actually do a lot of "harm to the planet" when they were new (though not plants, and more than 450 mya). The Oxygen catastrophe was one of the biggest mass extinctions in the planet's history. Oxygen was poisonous to most organisms at the time you see, but eventually organisms evolved to use the oxygen, and a new balance was reached.
I know this is crash course and youre short on time, since youre trying to keep the videos at about 10 mins, but I was a bit dissapointed with the absence of certain topics. Could you maybe do a video about 4th gen nuclear reactors, or carbon capture as a way of making biofuels more environmentally-friendly? I'd personally be mostly interested in a video on the former, since it seems like a more complex topic, and it would be great to have a video that explains the pros and cons of the more viable/promising 4th gen nuclear reactor types. Especially since, from the little research I've done, it seems we're closer to implementing them into the grid than fusion reactors.
Great!
A few points of correction about nuclear power (from a nuclear engineer). Nuclear energy makes up 20% of the electricity production in the US not 10%. Also the fission that you’re talking about is with slow moving (thermal) neutrons not fast moving neutrons. That being said, much of the information here is pretty accurate.
Please make crash course medical biochemistry or at least biochemistry. I really need it!
You should have left fuels cells for the "energy storage and batteries" video. Fuels cells aren't an energy source, just an energy storage method.
Why no mention of Thorium reactors? Less radioactive waste. Easier to turn off if needed, and byproducts commercially usefull. If I've been informed correctly.
Great video! However, you probably should have mentioned breeder fission reactors, which take the nearly limitless supply of fertile isotopes (mentioned in other comments) and converts them to fuel. A good number of reactors have been run that actually produce more fuel than they consume. Also, "don't be fooled" in a weird way of saying that it's the most energy-dense option on your list, so your mining requirements are MUCH lower than for other things. "Nuclear waste" is actually very little considering how much power they produce, and it can be reprocessed or used directly as fuel in fission reactors that don't slow down the neutrons, called fast reactors or burner reactors. Also, I will be very surprised if fusion is ever run in net positive energy, while fission already outputs WAY more energy than input, and currently is the best clean source for now.
OK team. 6:46 fast moving neutrons don't have any significant effect on the fission process. They have to be moderated by something to turn them into Thermal neutrons, ie slowed down, so that they can interact with fissionable material. More to come, maybe. T... W
Merci!
nice ep, needed more thorium reactors though.
Here in Brazil Biofuel and fossil fuel have the same price/energy. Biofuel mixed in gasoline makes it expensive and neither ethanol or gasoline have fair prices. That’s why we don’t use only ethanol. Politicians with artificial prices and bad market regulation.
How dose that relate to deforestation, monoculture, crop exports and the parts of crops not exported?
fiona fiona don’t know, I was talking about the fuel I can buy at gas station.
Regulation is done so it won't happen an ethanol crisis like in the late 1980s. Keep in mind sugarcane is also used to produce sugar and feed live stock. Ethanol is also more complicated to produce and have smaller margins for the sugarcane plantation owner. So while you defend the freemarket for yourself, the plantation owner can and will often produce less sugar to artificially increase the price of his crop leading to an ethanol price increase.
@0:48 No harm to the planet? NO HARM TO THE PLANET? Plants filled the atmosphere with toxic oxygen, completely changing the ecosystem!
I guess everything is relative =P
And we finally talk about what we always worry about, the future of renewable energy
Make more John Green Crash Courses!!!
Please re-examine your data on nuclear power. It is imperative that we present accurate depictions of every tool we have to fight climate change. US nuclear provides closer to 20% of the grid. Used fuel rods from plants have yet to have s ingle leak recorded (nuclear waste from weapons research is another matter and not related to the energy sector) I don't think that this is an issue that can be adequately explained in a short video.
Love the series,
Kind regards,
passionate engineering student.
fallout 76 in the nuclear waste 7:53
I was literally just studying this
Hi, I'm Mack. I am a Nuclear Engineer PhD student with papers published in Nuclear Fuel characterization. If anybody has questions or would like to discuss let me know!
At the time, I imagine plant were considered QUITE harmful to the planet. All that dangerous oxygen and all...
The Great Oxidation Event, hahaha.
running out of fossil fuels shouldn't even be part of the goal. We should be switching to renewables as quickly as we can regardless of how much fossil fuels are left. Having leftovers by the time we completely switch over is a good thing.
I seriously had my hwadphones on, but above the din,, I SWEAR a kid, having no attention to me, sang "la la la la" in the crash course theme.
Regarding poop: That is a secondary energy source. Before I can poop, I must eat. Before I can eat, food needs to be grown, before food can be grown, it must be fertilized. Before food can be fertilized, fertilizer must be synthesized. That has to be done through the Haber process or through electrolysis. The Haber process requires crude oil. Crude oil comes out of the ground and is a finite resource. OR it can be synthesized, but that synthesis requires a vast amount of energy.
Recycling the energy output from waste, including poop, but also general garbage, is already done, and can reduce our need for other energy sources, but the fact remains that our waste contains a fraction of the chemical potential energy of what it was before. Our base load still needs to be a large store of energy that will last eons. That can be stellar output, that can be whatever atomic nuclei we are able to turn into kinetic energy, that can be the energy deep inside of hot planets. In the far future, that may even be applicable between star systems. In the even farther future, we might even be able to extract energy from black holes. But, no matter what our energy will come from a primary store of energy, you cannot run a system on merely recycling the output, or else you will have created a perfect system.
If you do somehow create a perfect system, or you demonstrate that you can create and destroy energy at will. Please tell me how so I can start worshiping you as God.
I don't really see how radioactive waste is as much of an issue as people make it out to be. Got to be lots of deserts out there where you could bury it as long as you knew where the water was. Plus they could just go over the top on the containers. Having them wrapped in several layers of different materials.
you can also burn it inside an TWR
after that you're still left with Radioactive Particles
but you get some extra Energy out of it
Can you do a crash course on teratoma's
Sup with that shelf
The presence of poop emojis in the thumbnail implies waste recycling (EG poop) to generate energy.
Brown energy? Is that what it's called?
I won't advise using the atom pop picture as thumbnail
I’ve always thought that going back to burning plants was going backwards.
She covered magnetic fusion, but there are two additional methods of nuclear fusion, inertial confinement fusion, and Z-pinches.
Wouldn't there be a lot more rooms for plants if we stopped eating meat or at least cut down?
Aum what about cold fusion...is there such a thing?
it takes more energy to make the ethanol then u get out of it. its not carbon netural when you take a step back and look at the big picture. sure, if u got two identical cars and one is uses the ethanol and other other doesnt and u put a meter on the exhaust and measure it, the ethanol one will pump out less green house gasses but all the machines it took to produce the ethanol will add up to more than than what comes out of the exaust of the car that doesnt use ethanol. so the person who bought the car can drive around feeling better about themselves that in that moment they are putting less greehouse gasses into the atmosphere but thats only cause all the extra greenhouse gasses that that ethanol cars dont pump out into the atmosphere is actually ALREADY pumped out into the atmosphere.
hydrogen is or fusion(if thats even possible on the scale we want) are our only choices. we can get hydrogen from jupiter and we can use ion propulsion drives to get to jupiter and we can use carbon nano tubes to 'suck' up hydrogen from jupiter from orbit.
Did I just saw Fallout 76 in the nuclear waste pile? :'D
Was just watching endocrine episode 1.
Woah
I am a lawyer, and soon a doctor, I hope in the future to become a theoretical physicist, and I have never considered myself an engineer, education is closed to each branch and that's why they make mistakes. Because they think the engineers are the only qualified.
8:05 is spacex garbage or is spacex moving garbage ?
"Another form of life has been harvesting all it needs from the sun without doing any hard to the planet. Plants."
They just caused the first mass extinction :D Great Oxygenation Event
That wasn’t plants, and it wasn’t technically a mass extinction, too slow.
"no "matter" what"
I see what you did there
This world will be better off once we have clean energy as a regular fuel source.
As long as we continue to employ the spinning turbine generator philosophy we are going nowhere fast.
There is no doubt a more efficient way to harvest energy from its source than with a steam engine.
Except I think the first plants caused a mass extinction event. Admittedly of single-celled organisms, but that was harm to the ecosystem(s) which existed at the time.
Why not talk about breeder reactors for fission energy production. I've heard these are massively safer and produce a more stable waste.
Why no mention of LFTR reactors?
Because there's no reason to get into the messy details of different kinds of reactors in an overview of engineering.
It's pretty important in an honest discussion to discuss breeder reactors, pebble reactors and molten salt reactors in regards to mitigating waste. Also, that means they need to mention Uranium 238 and Thorium 233 since they're much, much more plentiful and produce same amount of energy as U-235 does in the appropriate systems.
The problem with Hydrogen fuel is that the molecules are so small that you get hydrogen cracking in the storage vessel... so it’s further unsustainable as you need to replace everything over time
Action réaction 2:08
Human kind already have the power to change everything. They junst don't want too because a few people control the world and they LOVE numbers on the screen ("money")
OK, Team. Why was a nuclear plant included at 1:39 to illustrate the topic of biofuels? It's distracting and a bit misleading. More to come maybe. T... W
so why not combine biomass and hydrogen with gasification? it has the added benefit of being carbon negative rather than neutral if done right
Besides the fact that biomass use is not carbon neutral, how can you designate it as clean with all the emissions and millions of premature deaths from burning biomass?
You can work and research Clean Energy following the career of Chemical Engineer.
Both renewables and nuclear are needed to help avert climate change
Soit positive où négatif il y a toujours un réactionnaire 4:06
kind off annoyed you left out the option to reprocess nuclear waste
sam frost I'm kind of annoyed they left out next gen reactors. She talked about nuclear fusion which is still speculative. While next gen reactors are still in the development phase, the feasibility has already been proven. It's a technology that could be deployed en mass relatively quickly and affordably.
@@ZaWyvern No, she mentioned it when saying that engineers are currently working to solve the issue of nuclear waste. That leaves the door open to discussion to currently known techniques being able to use >95% of the starting material, different reactor designs, and more!
...But, yea, I do I agree that reprocessing/recycling would have been more important to mention than to lump it in the above.
you totally left out MSR reactors and how they eat the majority of light and heavey water reactors waste!
Hydrogen Fuel? Love it when a Mechanical Engineer goes beyond their specialty...umm...Hydrogen is VERY explosive!!! LMAO.
My God, I didn't know we made people as beautiful as you.
Matthijs van Doorn that's real nice. She's doing her job and your here focused on her appearance and not her lessons.
@@lucytobier4367 Hello judgemental feminist. I was paying attention to what she was saying, but I also saw that she was beautiful and felt the need to compliment her. By the way, it's "you're" and not "your". Keep up in school please instead of complaining about men appreciating other people's appearances.
Hydrogen fuel cells requires platinum to directly deliver electrical energy and hydrogen has a nasty habit of escaping containers
And... no source is non-renewable. All energy & matter cannot be lost or created, they are just converted to different forms.
You're technically correct about thermodynamics but people aren't talking about thermo when they say "renewable energy". What we are talking about is a source that continues to have a similar output each day no matter how much is taken. For instance, if we use solar power today the output of the sun won't be less tomorrow. If we burn oil today, there will be less oil available tomorrow. Eventually we will run out of oil but we won't run out of sun (on human time scales).
so, Biomass is a clean energy while it's not clean?
and nuclear is a new energy though it's non re-newable?
molten salt reactors are the answer
1.can we use nuclear waste?
yes
you can burn it inside an TWR which does not have a Chance of Exploding
Quite note, because apparently I have to proselytize for this, the nuclear fuel we need has already been mined and refined. The US has enough stockpiled to fill all our energy needs for many years to come. Furthermore, nuclear waste is less radioactive than the fuel you started with, and is not released as massive amounts of exhaust, and can therefore be safely transported to underground storage facilities for the rest of their lifespan. Despite what we hear in the video, this solution works quite well. Finally, nuclear meltdown is an obsolete process of reactors past. That problem has been solved, modern reactors cannot melt down.
And don't shoot radioactive waste into space... Just don't.
Thorium
I am really convinced this badass girl is the incarnation of Rakshata Chawla
Good not in the park
sounds like shes reading up from an article
the only reason i was able to understand and literally get an A on my test was because she was attractive to me AF and had an accent good thing I'm american. And probably shouldn't text this during valentines day because I might get a steak knife from the back from my bae, but thank you for this info.
Nuclear waste, long feared, is actually what I see as one of its great strengths. So few energy sources have such dense waste profiles. Everything we made has waste, most of it rather toxic and bad for humans, including renewables. One of the nice things about nuclear waste is that it can be easily managed because it is so small per unit energy. This fear of it from the public has forced nuclear to internalize most of its waste cost up front (all waste disposal in the US is payed for up front via the cost of the electricity). This can't be said of other sources of energy, including renewables but most notably fossil fuels. Our great fears of nuclear might have given us one of the most progressive forms of energy we have, neat!
and also given enough time nuclear waste decays on it's own, not to mention that nuclear power isn't the only source of radioactive waste. there is radioactive waste in ash from coal, tailings from rare earth mining (ie.: for RE components), medical waste, etc... the only difference is that waste from fuel rods is highly concentrated. fusion power also produces radioactive waste like activation products, possibly tritium leaks...
fusion (like some other next gen nuclear) enthusiasts hold a bit of naivety, and try to distance themselves from conventional fission power, as they mistakenly believe they can avoid the wrath of anti nuclear sentiments. this strategy is doomed to backfire. much of next gen nuclear progress is dependent on roll out of current licensed tech. progress in engineering and structural materials of the former help the
later.
a lot of anti nuclear talking points fusion is even more ill equipped to deal with. think of scalability for example: fission can scale from kW to GW range. fusion will likely be limited to GW range.
talk about the roll out time and upfront costs. proliferation? with fusion, no problem (if people associate fission with the a-bomb, then fusion = thermonuclear = 1000x the bang).
then there is this sentiment of comparing giving humanity an endless supply of energy to giving a toddler an automatic rifle...
Clean energy is nice idea, just needs to be a practical one as well.
I have science magazines from the early 1950s that said we were 10 years away from a substantial fusion reactor... Fast forward 70ish years later and we are still 10 years away.
What you should have said is fossil fuels have their drawbacks but over all they are what allows 7.5 billion people to live in our world and currently it is the only efficient/reliable way we have to make energy.
You should have went on to say as we become more interconnected our energy needs keep growing with no real easy answer in sight and we all need to be working for a better way to harvest energy... But nope PBS had to have you mention "climate change". But like all other Liberal agendas it gave absolutely no answer on how to deal with it.
Any chance Crash Course could do a video explaining cryptocurrency?
Caroline Chilton There are already many great videos on cryptocurrency
Adrian ....Yeah. But I enjoy Crash Course’s style. That’s why I asked
Plants did change the climate. In fact they oxidized the entire planet.
Technically, fossil fuels are "carbon neutral." They came from carbon based organisms.
The carbon has been out of the atmosphere for millions of years. We are re-introducing it to the atmosphere. Carbon neutrality usually refers to the amount of carbon in the atmosphere in 1700, not 100 million years ago.
Fossile fuel does not exist. The origin of oil is abiotic. It is an infinite power source. No such thing as peak oil.
What about free energy machines that work with magnets?
She says "plant" like "plont". very interesting as an American.
Please Get Turkish subtitles 🖐️