Category: 03. Energy

Technically, there are two kinds of nuclear power—fusion and fission. Humans have not quite figured out how to make an efficient fusion reactor, so let me focus on a fission reaction. The fission reactor starts with a heavy atom like uranium-235 and hits it with a neutron. The atom absorbs this neutron to become uranium-236.…

I wonder what else we could get to turn one of those electric turbines. What if we put a large blade on the front of the turbine so that wind could turn it. Yup. That’s wind power. Since energy is conserved, that must mean that when you get electrical energy from the wind turbine then…

I would like to call this “hydropower” instead of hydroelectric, but that’s the common name that everyone uses. The thing is that we have been using some form of hydropower for a long time—the water wheel is much older than the invention of electricity. In terms of electrical energy, it’s not too complicated. In fact…

If you just go outside during a sunny day, you can feel it. You can feel your body warming up as a result of the interaction with the light from the sun. In fact, at our location in the solar system, the sun gives us about 1,000 watts per square meter of power. Of course,…

Let’s move on to the practical aspect of how we use energy. Fossil fuels are probably the most common energy source and one that humans have been using for the longest time. The basic idea of fossil fuel energy is to take some carbon and combine it with oxygen, forming carbon dioxide along with some…

Energy isn’t actually real—it’s just a way for us to keep track of interactions. (Humans deal with stuff that isn’t real all the time. Words—words aren’t “real,” they are just ways that one human can share an idea with other humans.) If we keep track of all the energy changes in different interactions, we find…