Serializing New Nuclear is Hot!
Energy for civilization chapter
If you haven’t yet read the New Nuclear is Hot! book you can read a new chapter each week. I plan to publish a chapter a week.
What’s important about HOT!
Classic nuclear reactor power plants use water to transfer fission’s heat energy to a turbine-generator. Emerging small modular reactors continue the water technology but forgo new, high heat opportunities and efficiencies of new nuclear power.
New nuclear reactors exploit hotter heat in fluids such as molten salts, liquid sodium, or helium gas. Their red hot temperature heat puts nearly 50% more of the reactor’s fission energy into electric energy, not into the cooling water that condenses turbine-generator steam. Waterside new nuclear power plants use about half the cooling water of current ones.
Hot heat also brings new uses. Hot heat can break hydrogen out of seawater cheaply, heat buildings, power electrochemical separators to capture CO2, and energize new refineries to produce net zero fuels from the CO2 and hydrogen.
Energy for civilization
Energy and civilization chapter covers the evolution of humans from hunter-gatherers to civilizations enabled by fire. It explains the essential understanding of the oft-confused concepts of heat energy and work energy, and the distinction of energy and power. The industrial revolution happened when James Watt invented the way to convert heat to work. We term it the Watt Age, because Watt made work energy plentiful.
Civilization evolved via heat and work
World population had been relatively stable, under 4 million people, through a million years of history up to the start time of this graph, 12,000 years ago. Population began to increase a bit during the Bronze Age, then more rapidly during the Iron Age. Population spiked during the industrial revolution, termed here the Watt Age, to honor Watt’s development of converting heat to work. Note that the graph’s horizontal axis change of scale at year zero, else the spike would look even steeper.
Three billion people live in energy poverty, served with less electricity than your old refrigerator uses. Nearly a billion have no electric power at all. They need more energy to power industry and commerce for even modest prosperity. They are adding hundreds of new coal-fired and gas-fired power plants.
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Excellent "book" Robert! Congratulations! Let's get in touch! My name is Hugh Sharman. My email is sharman@incoteco.com and my phone/WhatsApp is +45 40551760
"Waterside new nuclear power plants use about half the cooling water of current ones."
That probably refers to water-cooled reactors, not Molten Salt Reactors; MSR heat that isn't used for industrial processes (electric generation, water desalination, etc) would simply remain in the reactor, the reactor materials can withstand far higher temperatures than the reactor ever gets, unlike LWR.