Electricity

I like electricity. It powers my microwave, my light bulbs, my computer screens and my clocks. My parents were introduced to electricity (yes, I’m that old) but when I’d flip the switch on the wall, there was light.

Electricity is the presence and flow of electric charge. Using electricity we can transfer energy in ways that allow us to accomplish common chores. Its best-known form is the flow of electrons through conductors such as copper wires. ... An item, which allows electricity to move through it, is called a conductor.

I know someone somewhere (I think it was called Vepco) ran power lines on the same poles that were used for telephones. They would run a line over your yard and hook it up to a glass cylinder with a rotating wheel meter on the outside of the house. Inside there was a metal panel with glass fuses. If too much power was used the fuse would blow and have to be unscrewed and replaced before the lights would come back on.

No one yet has found a way to Bluetooth electricity so we are still wired to make Siri answer our questions.

How is all this power made?

The three major categories of energy for electricity generation are fossil fuels (coal, natural gas, and petroleum), nuclear energy, and renewable energy sources. Most electricity is generated with steam turbines using fossil fuels, nuclear, biomass, geothermal, and solar thermal energy.

Coal and gas are burned to heat water and turn it into steam. The steam, at a very high pressure, is then used to spin a turbine. ... The moving magnets cause electrons in the wires to move from one place to another, creating an electrical current and producing electricity.

Sounds like an easy process. Heat the water, turn the wheel, create the power and send it down the line to your house.

There would be no Beatles without electricity. There would be no television without electricity. There would be no vacuum cleaners with electricity (they were called brooms). There would be no hair dryers, washer/dryers, refrigerators, phonographs or Internet without electricity.

A fossil fuel is a fuel formed by natural processes, such as anaerobic decomposition of buried dead organisms, containing energy originating in ancient photosynthesis. ... Fossil fuels contain high percentages of carbon and include petroleum, coal, and natural gas.

Remember the dinosaurs?

Seems when they all died they turned into puddles of fuel for all our needs.

As a fossil fuel burned for heat, coal supplies about a quarter of the world’s primary energy and two-fifths of its electricity. Some iron and steel making and other industrial processes burn coal.

Before the compression turns it into diamonds, there is coal.

Coal is a combustible black or brownish-black sedimentary rock, formed as rock strata called coal seams. Coal is mostly carbon with variable amounts of other elements; chiefly hydrogen, sulfur, oxygen, and nitrogen.

Coal is formed when dead plant matter decays into peat and is converted into coal by the heat and pressure of deep burial over millions of years. Vast deposits of coal originate in former wetlands—called coal forests—that covered much of the Earth’s tropical land areas during the late Carboniferous (Pennsylvanian) and Permian times.

The extraction and use of coal causes many premature deaths and much illness. Coal industry damages the environment, including by climate change, as it is the largest anthropogenic source of carbon dioxide, 14 Gt in 2016, which is 40% of the total fossil fuel emissions. As part of the worldwide energy transition many countries have stopped using or use less coal, and the UN Secretary General has asked governments to stop building new coal plants by 2020.

The largest consumer and importer of coal is China. China mines almost half the world’s coal, followed by India with about a tenth. Australia accounts for about a third of world coal exports followed by Indonesia and Russia.

My first house had a little window in the basement. It was the coal chute for a delivery truck to open and pour coal into my basement allowing me the pleasure of stocking the furnace like a locomotive. I’m not that old, but it was a reminder of not a distant time.

The smoke from coal power plants is exceedingly dangerous to human health. When coal burns, the chemical bonds holding its carbon atoms in place are broken, releasing energy. However, other chemical reactions also occur, many of which carry toxic airborne pollutants and heavy metals into the environment.

Many weekend would spend time in the park by the river watching the endless line of railroad cars filled with coal ride east to the power plant. I can still hear the rumble from my house in the middle of the night.

Coal ash dust is generally known as particulate matter (particle pollution) and the dust particles can harm the lungs when inhaled. Workers increase their risk of harmful side effects when they inhale the smallest coal ash dust particles.

So what happens with the ash when the coal is burnt?

So far as benefits in the garden, coal ash can help break up compacted clay, improve drainage and probably add at least small amounts of nutrients (although not as much as wood ash). ... The coal was mined from the Earth and burned, so it’s akin to lime, greensand and similar minerals used in gardening.

Just like that charcoal in your Hibachi grill there is left over ash. It was easy just to throw it into the trash and forget about it, but what about the power plants burning tons of coal?

Coal the dirtiest, most lethal energy source we have. But by most measures it’s also the cheapest, and we depend on it. So the big question today isn't whether coal can ever be “clean.” ... It’s whether coal can ever be clean enough—to prevent not only local disasters but also a radical change in global climate.

Although natural gas burning emits less fatal pollutants and GHGs than coal burning, it is far deadlier than nuclear power, causing about 40 times more deaths per unit electric energy produced. Also, such fuel switching is practically guaranteed to worsen the climate problem for several reasons.

High-level radioactive waste management concerns how radioactive materials created during production of nuclear power and nuclear weapons are dealt with. Radioactive waste contains a mixture of short-lived and long-lived nuclides, as well as non-radioactive nuclides. There was reported some 47,000 tonnes of high-level nuclear waste stored in the USA in 2002.

The most troublesome transuranic elements in spent fuel are neptunium-237 (half-life two million years) and plutonium-239 (half-life 24,000 years).

Consequently, high-level radioactive waste requires sophisticated treatment and management to successfully isolate it from the biosphere. This usually necessitates treatment, followed by a long-term management strategy involving permanent storage, disposal or transformation of the waste into a non-toxic form.

So if coal, fracking oil and gas, nuclear are not good power sources, then what?

Wind? Solar?

I’ve got to power up my cell phone battery or I will not get the last FOMO!

Our forefathers didn’t have smart speakers. Their phones were dumb. When energy conservation meant how much oil in the lamp to read the next chapter was precious.

I don’t have all the answers. I ride a bike. I heat with gas. There is only one light on at a time. It is not totally carbon free, but it is the best I can do.

The question is what do we do with all this coal sludge after it burns.

Like all our other cast offs, we dump it in the ground or pour it into the water. There it sits and intermingles until it becomes toxic, then we complain about it.

So here is an option.

Send it all into space!

We like to shoot off rockets and fill the atmosphere with shiny object that will allow us to dial up people on the other the side of the globe to comment on their Twitter feed.

We (and I use the communal ‘we’) have a history of pushing our waste onto someone else’s land, so here is the idea.

Shoot the stuff out into space!

All that plastic stuff that is worrying your mind that has a problem being recycled and is conflicting your best effort with a pile of trash…. Shoot it out into space.

Save the whales the trouble of eating those plastic straws… Shoot it out into space.

Landfill full? No problem…. Shoot it out into space.

No more space in the cemetery? …. Shot it out into space.

First test it out on the moon. Make sure you put it on the backside so we can still view the man-on-the-moon.

If not we can just shoot it out into the deep blackness and introduce any other celestial travelers our trash. What better way to introduce us?