Speaker 1: Brought to you by Toyota. Let's go places. Welcome to
Speaker 1: Forward Thinking. Welcome to Forward Thinking, the audio podcast where
Speaker 1: we talk about the future and the things we need
Speaker 1: to take in consideration, because of course, the future is
Speaker 1: where we will spend the rest of our lives. I'm
Speaker 1: Jonathan Strickland, I'm Lauren Vocaldon, and I'm Joe McCormick, and
Speaker 1: future events such as these will concern you in the future.
Speaker 1: That's right, that's right. We're just going to quote Edwood
Speaker 1: movies for the rest of this episode. Actually that's not true.
Speaker 1: We're going to talk about energy and electricity and waste
Speaker 1: and ways that we can be smarter about generating electricity
Speaker 1: and hopefully managing the waste problem that we have while
Speaker 1: trying to create electricity. In a previous episode, we talked
Speaker 1: about fusion, which is where you fuse to light atoms
Speaker 1: together and in the process you release quite a bit
Speaker 1: of energy in the form of heat, which then turns
Speaker 1: water into steam, and that steam then turned steam turbines,
Speaker 1: which then connected to electrical generators creates electricity. Yeah right, right,
Speaker 1: which which is a lot more efficient than anything that
Speaker 1: we have today, um like like nuclear fission right right.
Speaker 1: If we can, if we can get fusion to work
Speaker 1: as promise, we have to make sure that the reactions
Speaker 1: themselves are giving off enough energy that it's more than
Speaker 1: what was required for us to get that reaction started
Speaker 1: in the first place. That's where we're kind of hitting
Speaker 1: the wall right now. We don't know for sure that
Speaker 1: we can do that. So fusion is a great possibility,
Speaker 1: and I think it's it's an excellent place to do research.
Speaker 1: But we shouldn't put all our eggs in one basket. Yes, no,
Speaker 1: don't put all your electro eggs in one energy basket,
Speaker 1: as I said, right, because that could be a big problem.
Speaker 1: Think about this. I mean, imagine that even if we
Speaker 1: are able to get a positive energy gain factor and
Speaker 1: a fusion reactor within a hundred years, there's no guarantee
Speaker 1: that will make it that long unless we look at
Speaker 1: al Yeah. So so fusion may not work at all,
Speaker 1: which means that we need to look into alternatives anyway,
Speaker 1: and if it does work, it may be decades there.
Speaker 1: So either way, looking into alternatives where we maximize our
Speaker 1: production of electricity, which is really what we're talking about here,
Speaker 1: and we minimize the waste that's going to be important
Speaker 1: because we don't if we if in a hundred years
Speaker 1: we get fusion, but the world is not really a
Speaker 1: livable space anymore. It's not going to be so pleasant
Speaker 1: for the human race anyway, so we have to look
Speaker 1: into these alternatives. Well, Jonathan, I like the way you
Speaker 1: put that with in terms of maximizing and minimizing, because
Speaker 1: I think a lot of the innovations that are going
Speaker 1: to get us into the future, um aren't just you know,
Speaker 1: crazy new ideas that nobody has ever heard of before,
Speaker 1: you know, like a completely out of left field new technology.
Speaker 1: A lot of it is just going to be um
Speaker 1: finding smarter, more efficient ways to do the thing this
Speaker 1: we already do. Sure, Yeah, yeah, definitely looking for energy
Speaker 1: where we can find it. And I mean we've got
Speaker 1: lots of examples of this and things like you know,
Speaker 1: the the improvement of efficiency and wind turbines and solar farms,
Speaker 1: but those have been talked about a lot nausea. Yeah,
Speaker 1: And one of the one of the basic problems with
Speaker 1: creating energy is that we don't have an infante supply
Speaker 1: of coal or oil or uranium or any of the
Speaker 1: other things that we're currently using to produce it. Right,
Speaker 1: And just in case anyone wants to write in and
Speaker 1: yell creating electricity, we know energy can either be created
Speaker 1: nor destroyed. We can only convert mass into energy, which
Speaker 1: is still not creating it. It's just a transformation. Yeah yeah,
Speaker 1: you know, Hey, I obey the laws of physics, all right,
Speaker 1: so don't send them after me. But one of the
Speaker 1: things that Joe found out when he was researching this episode,
Speaker 1: I mean, Joe wrote the video episode about energy and
Speaker 1: you discovered an interesting approach to making nuclear fission reactions
Speaker 1: more efficient, because that's one of the problems with nuclear fission. Right. Well,
Speaker 1: so we've had nuclear fission for years and years, but um,
Speaker 1: there are a lot of problems with it. It creates
Speaker 1: really really toxic nuclear waste that you have to protect,
Speaker 1: you know, you lock it up in graphite beams and
Speaker 1: bury it underground under a mountain. Right. It's it's all,
Speaker 1: it's all so dangerous that it's technically the as soon
Speaker 1: as it's created, it belongs to the government. It belongs
Speaker 1: to the Department of Energy to right, Yeah, that's exactly
Speaker 1: who I want to have access to all the most
Speaker 1: dangerous things in the world, right, And then there are
Speaker 1: and then there's the fact that we're not really getting
Speaker 1: all of the energy that we can out of these
Speaker 1: fuel rods. I mean, so what do you what do
Speaker 1: you use to cause a reaction and a fission reactor
Speaker 1: and your standard nuclear power plant you have fuel rods
Speaker 1: that are full of tiny uranium pellets refined URANIU. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's not just highlighting rich yeah exactly. Um, that you
Speaker 1: use to you set off a reaction in them, and
Speaker 1: that that creates a fission reaction that releases a lot
Speaker 1: of energy, heats water, and creates your electricity. Um. The
Speaker 1: problems we've said so far waste um not the most
Speaker 1: efficient reaction. Also, there's a big danger as we learned
Speaker 1: from the Fushima incident during the earthquake Noble and three
Speaker 1: Mile Island, although that wasn't the meltdown. But yeah, but
Speaker 1: so uh, these reactors are potentially very dangerous. You have
Speaker 1: to be extremely careful with them. Is there a way
Speaker 1: to get around this? And that's where the waste annihilating
Speaker 1: molten salt reactor from Transitomic comes in. It's a cool name. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it just rolls off the tongue. As I said in
Speaker 1: in the episode yeah, I like to call it wamser.
Speaker 1: You know, wams are waste annihilating molten salt reaction. Then
Speaker 1: you don't get to say annihilating and annihilating annihilating. Yeah,
Speaker 1: well I say that so frequently in my daily life.
Speaker 1: But yeah, the idea here is to try and maximize
Speaker 1: that efficiency. In fact, Transatomic claims on their website that
Speaker 1: the conventional nuclear reactors that use fission reactions only capture
Speaker 1: about three of the potential fission energy and a given
Speaker 1: amount of uranium before the uranium has to be removed
Speaker 1: from the reactor or else you're in danger of a meltdown. Uh.
Speaker 1: Their design, again, the company claims, will capture of the
Speaker 1: remaining energy that would have otherwise been lost. That's pretty yeah,
Speaker 1: that's that's that's incredibly more efficient if that. In fact,
Speaker 1: if you buy their claim, it combines several existing technologies.
Speaker 1: It um so the waste annihilating molten salt reactor. It
Speaker 1: uses this, uh, this molten salt. You might ask, what
Speaker 1: is molten salt? Well, you don't usually encounter molten salt
Speaker 1: in your day to day life, but um, but in
Speaker 1: this case, it's it's not um molten salt doesn't like
Speaker 1: become the fuel or something like that. Molten salt is
Speaker 1: what this reactor uses to manage its heat. Yeah, as
Speaker 1: you are using the uranium in that initial fission reaction,
Speaker 1: you are getting nuclear waste as a result. You dissolve
Speaker 1: the nuclear waste or rather transitomic would dissolve the nuclear
Speaker 1: waste within this molten salt, which manages the heat. And
Speaker 1: it means that if you want to really simplify it,
Speaker 1: it means that the reactor can safely maintain the temperature
Speaker 1: it needs to continue to turn water into steam to
Speaker 1: turn those steam turbines and generate electricity. So you're you
Speaker 1: are really extending the useful life out of that uranium.
Speaker 1: And uh, as a result, less of the uranium is
Speaker 1: left behind. And uranium that's the that's the radioactive material
Speaker 1: that is so dangerous. Less nuclear waste at the yeah,
Speaker 1: the the or at least less radioactive waste. I mean,
Speaker 1: however you wanted to find it, it's gonna be Le's
Speaker 1: radioactive waste. And from the estimates I saw, it reduces
Speaker 1: the amount of time where this radioactive waste is dangerous
Speaker 1: from the thousands of years two around three hundred years.
Speaker 1: Still longer than anyone's comfortable lifespan, obviously, but that's a
Speaker 1: huge difference from this. You know, it won't be safe
Speaker 1: to go near for ten thousand years because marking that
Speaker 1: barrel is difficult. Well, it also means that if you're
Speaker 1: able to build these reactors, then it's there's the potential
Speaker 1: of taking nuclear waste that has already been generated and
Speaker 1: using that as a fuel, which there are tons and
Speaker 1: tons of just kind of lying about. Really, I mean, well,
Speaker 1: I hope it's that. Yeah, I'm thinking about some cities
Speaker 1: I visited where I thought barrels of nuclear waste would
Speaker 1: not seem out of place. But I would like to
Speaker 1: think that they are mostly confined in fairly secure, according
Speaker 1: to the to the documentary Duke Newcomb's according to Duke Newcomb,
Speaker 1: they are a tasty shake. Um. Yeah. I know. Something
Speaker 1: else that I thought was interesting, this is just sort
Speaker 1: of an aside, is that the company has three founders.
Speaker 1: Two of them are M. I. T. Students, and the
Speaker 1: third is Rust Wilcox, who was the former CEO of
Speaker 1: e INK. And I never would have thought of electronic
Speaker 1: ink and uh, nuclear fission going hand in hand. But
Speaker 1: it's interesting because you know, e ink is all about
Speaker 1: efficiency to it's this idea of that you create a
Speaker 1: state of the ink, so it's displaying either a a
Speaker 1: neutral side or a dark side to the screen, and
Speaker 1: it maintains that until you change the state of the
Speaker 1: electrostatic field, which means that you know, once you establish it. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you establish it and it stays that way. That's why
Speaker 1: if you're using an e reader, it's not using energy
Speaker 1: until you turn the page, so in between page turns,
Speaker 1: that's that's why those batteries last forever, because it's not
Speaker 1: using a lot of electricity. So in that case, that's
Speaker 1: the only thing I can think of that's similar between
Speaker 1: the two. This isn't a new idea, I don't think.
Speaker 1: I think that they were first proposed to power bombers,
Speaker 1: and one was operated back in the sixties and seventies
Speaker 1: at a Gridge National Labs, So it's it's been around
Speaker 1: for a minute, but just you know, not in a
Speaker 1: there are newer and better designs, I think, right, exactly, Yeah,
Speaker 1: Because again, if it's one of those things where it's
Speaker 1: a a modest increase in efficiency, it may not be
Speaker 1: worth the expense of turning around uranium. Yeah, Yeah, design,
Speaker 1: either designing and building a reactor or refitting existing reactors
Speaker 1: to be able to to use this sort of methodology. Um,
Speaker 1: you have to demonstrate that it's of an incredible value
Speaker 1: before that becomes you know, economically feasible. Well, and as
Speaker 1: we mentioned before, part of the value also of a
Speaker 1: molten salt reactor is that they say that it is
Speaker 1: much less vulnerable to meltdown right right, right, Yeah, it
Speaker 1: would stop the reactor. It wouldn't have the potential to
Speaker 1: explode the way that. Yeah, essentially, it wouldn't have the
Speaker 1: potential for the uranium to reach a temperature that the
Speaker 1: reactor itself would be unable to contain. Um. That's generally,
Speaker 1: I mean the idea that I get from it. So,
Speaker 1: uh so it's it's got good potential and you know,
Speaker 1: it cuts down on waste. So we wanted to talk
Speaker 1: about another kind of technology. Yeah, this isn't the only
Speaker 1: technology like this, right that both cuts down on waste
Speaker 1: and get something back out of it. Yeah, So so
Speaker 1: what you're you're referring to, I assume is plasma gasification,
Speaker 1: which also sounds really cool. These things have great names
Speaker 1: plasma waste converters. All Right, you know, I write for
Speaker 1: how stuff works dot com and one of the very
Speaker 1: first articles I wrote was about how plasma waste converters work.
Speaker 1: And as a result, I got to actually go and
Speaker 1: speak with some of the thought leaders in plasma waiste converters.
Speaker 1: I got to watch footage. Actually somewhere, I have a
Speaker 1: piece of slag from a plasma waste converter reaction. You
Speaker 1: might want to explain what slag is, Yeah, I will,
Speaker 1: I will, so so alright, So, plasma waste converters are
Speaker 1: all designed to get rid of garbage and convert it
Speaker 1: into one of two things. Anything that is non organic,
Speaker 1: meaning it is not carbon based, gets liquefied. All right.
Speaker 1: This liquid stuff ends up being inert, so there's not
Speaker 1: anything toxic about it. Uh. And when it cools, you know,
Speaker 1: either if you cool it by air, then it turns
Speaker 1: into this kind of rocky substance that looks like obsidian
Speaker 1: or volcanic glass um, And that's the slag. If you
Speaker 1: cool it in water, by the way, it beats up
Speaker 1: into little pebbles. And if you run compressed air through it,
Speaker 1: which I got to see a video of, and boy
Speaker 1: was that terrifying because it was actually a dude with
Speaker 1: a hose compressed air, standing next to a stream of
Speaker 1: molten slade. I mean it looks like lava as well
Speaker 1: as like this molten slags pouring out of a spigot
Speaker 1: and he's blowing compressed air through it, making these these
Speaker 1: strands of of slag which, when they cool through the air,
Speaker 1: become this sort of fluffy substance that apparently is incredibly
Speaker 1: efficient as an in slator. And it also it also
Speaker 1: floats some water and it soaks up oil. So you
Speaker 1: could even use this to help soak up oil in
Speaker 1: an oil spill if you wanted to. It's what was
Speaker 1: it called rock wool? That's it. It's all coming back
Speaker 1: to me. It's been years since I've written this article.
Speaker 1: But anyway, so this sounds great. I mean, why why
Speaker 1: don't we have these on every street corner? Well, well,
Speaker 1: before I even get there, I haven't even gotten to
Speaker 1: the really cool part yet. Well, I want to know
Speaker 1: what creates the heat that liquefies this. I haven't gotten
Speaker 1: to that. Yea, just go John and talk about the
Speaker 1: other half. I just said the non organic, what about
Speaker 1: the organic? That's the question you should be asking questions Okay,
Speaker 1: here's what happens. The organic stuff, anything that's carbon based, gasifies,
Speaker 1: so it turns into a gas. That's because the incredible
Speaker 1: amount of energy you are applying to this stuff in
Speaker 1: the form of heat, turns it almost instantaneously into gas.
Speaker 1: Now that gas you can then put through chemical scrubbers.
Speaker 1: You have to cool it down first. You put it
Speaker 1: through a cooling system. So the gas, because the gas
Speaker 1: is incredibly hot when it when it first goes through
Speaker 1: the system, you cool it down and in that process
Speaker 1: you can actually capture some of that heat and turn
Speaker 1: water into steam and generate electricity that way. But you
Speaker 1: can also scrub it with other chemicals, removing some of
Speaker 1: the harmful elements out of it, making it alert. And
Speaker 1: the rest of what you have left is a synthetic
Speaker 1: gas that can be used as fuel. So those are
Speaker 1: your two outcomes. Is gas that can be used as
Speaker 1: fuel and inert slag cool stuff. So what makes this
Speaker 1: heat is a plasma torch, and so plasma is an
Speaker 1: ionized gas. It's a gas with free roaming ions, so
Speaker 1: that means electrons are also free roaming in this gas.
Speaker 1: It burns an incredible temperature. We're talking like surface of
Speaker 1: the sun or hotter degrees something like that. Something like that. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and and at that temperature you're breaking those chemical bonds
Speaker 1: and that's what's current making everything either melt or gasify
Speaker 1: again depending upon what it's made out of. So you
Speaker 1: have to provide energy to the plasma torch so it
Speaker 1: will maintain this plasma field, this very hot field, and
Speaker 1: that's what you know, that's what makes this thing go.
Speaker 1: You use use the cooling system around the reactor, which
Speaker 1: again can capture off that heat and use that to
Speaker 1: help generate electricity. And assuming you have enough carbon material
Speaker 1: in the garbage that you're processing, you can create enough
Speaker 1: synthetic gas to act as fuel to run the whole
Speaker 1: system and even potentially, if you have enough of it,
Speaker 1: sell electricity back to the grid, So you would actually
Speaker 1: be generating electricity by not really burning but processing garbage.
Speaker 1: It also has a couple of other phases. You usually
Speaker 1: would um have a phase where you try to retrieve
Speaker 1: any metal before going through this system, so casting on
Speaker 1: metal you could actually recycle into other stuff and otherwise
Speaker 1: it's just gonna melt down. Um, So you would try
Speaker 1: and have to sort the garbage first, and usually grind
Speaker 1: the stuff up. You've got some heavy grinders that grind
Speaker 1: everything up into little pieces before it gets exposed to
Speaker 1: the plasma torch, because then you've you've really cut down
Speaker 1: on all that surface area and make it a lot
Speaker 1: easier to process it. And reason why they aren't everywhere, Lauren,
Speaker 1: to get to your question, not gonna answer Joe's question
Speaker 1: about how it does this is because it's it would
Speaker 1: be very expensive to build these things, all right. So
Speaker 1: building the plant is expensive, you could co locate it
Speaker 1: at a dump essentially like any place where there's a landfill.
Speaker 1: You could put it at the landfill. I mean there
Speaker 1: it is right there next to its fuel source. And
Speaker 1: in fact, most of the figures I saw was that
Speaker 1: once you get to a certain size of a facility
Speaker 1: for a plasma waste converter plant, you would be able
Speaker 1: to not only take in all the garbage that was
Speaker 1: coming in from a community, but in fact start to
Speaker 1: mine any existing landfills. So in other words, you would
Speaker 1: take care of the garbage problem and remove the landfills. Eventually,
Speaker 1: over several decades worth of time, the landfills would get
Speaker 1: smaller and smaller until you had reclaimed them. And then
Speaker 1: the plasma wast facility would just take in incoming garbage. Uh.
Speaker 1: And it wouldn't produce as much energy at that point obviously,
Speaker 1: because you know, part of its fuel supplies gone. But
Speaker 1: in a way, that's a good problem to have because
Speaker 1: it's taken away this environmental concern that we have. So
Speaker 1: and in addition to this usable gas that you get
Speaker 1: from it that you can burn, the slag is also useful, right, yeah,
Speaker 1: you can. You can use it as aggregate, you can
Speaker 1: use it in building materials. You can use it to
Speaker 1: freak out your co workers if you like. I had
Speaker 1: a like I said, I had a small sample of
Speaker 1: this inside a plastic box. And uh, one of our
Speaker 1: former co workers, his name's John Fuller. He sat next
Speaker 1: to me at in our cubicles, and I had this little,
Speaker 1: you know, clear plastic box that had this piece of
Speaker 1: what looked like volcanic rock in it. And he picked
Speaker 1: it up one day and he was looking at the
Speaker 1: box and I said, yeah, it's slag from from a
Speaker 1: plasma waist converter. I got it. When I was interviewing
Speaker 1: the guy who bought this idea up. He says, oh,
Speaker 1: that's so cool, and he pops the top of it
Speaker 1: off and puts the rock in his hand like oh what,
Speaker 1: Oh no, I gotta make some calls like oh no,
Speaker 1: and he started freaking out like no, I'm just kidding you. Um.
Speaker 1: But Yeah, for a while there, he thought that he
Speaker 1: had excellently unleashed the zombie plague. Yeah, John has moved
Speaker 1: on to bigger and better things, where hopefully his coworkers
Speaker 1: don't make him think that he's created the zombie apocalypse.
Speaker 1: Uh that I just couldn't resist. The other thing I
Speaker 1: should mention is that plasma waste converters are not the
Speaker 1: solution to all of our energy problems. They could help
Speaker 1: offset energy production, but but they wouldn't be producing enough
Speaker 1: electricity to replace things like, you know, fossil fuels or
Speaker 1: solar plants or anything like that. It just would help,
Speaker 1: of course not. But the point I think we're making
Speaker 1: here is that every little bit actually does help. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and it also ends up impacting another problem, the environmental
Speaker 1: issues of Yeah. Some some of the detractors of it
Speaker 1: have said that, well what if what if we have
Speaker 1: these everywhere and then nobody recycles, And I think that
Speaker 1: that's kind of missing the scope of writing if nobody recycles,
Speaker 1: but there the recycling thing. Yeah, that's a weird argument.
Speaker 1: I can't imagine why you would make that, Like I
Speaker 1: guess maybe people in Portland. Well, no, I don't know
Speaker 1: the economics of it. There may be a reason why
Speaker 1: recycling is important, like if you want to obviously, if
Speaker 1: you're converting all these different things to just slag and
Speaker 1: gas um, there may be materials that we want to
Speaker 1: keep in quantity if there, If there are, recycling would
Speaker 1: be important for any material that requires a great deal
Speaker 1: of energy for us to access or convert into whatever
Speaker 1: it is we use. So, for example, um glass not
Speaker 1: a problem. Glass is made out of sand. We have
Speaker 1: sand and heat and that's easy to do. So glass. Actually,
Speaker 1: I've heard lots of arguments that saying that recycling glass
Speaker 1: actually doesn't make that much sense because the amount of
Speaker 1: energy needed to recycle the glass is greater than it
Speaker 1: would be to create new glass. So the better thing
Speaker 1: to do with glass is not just used it and
Speaker 1: throw it away, but to reuse. Because we hear about
Speaker 1: reuse and recycle, this would be a case for reusing.
Speaker 1: But things like plastics that's different, you know you or
Speaker 1: aluminium would be different too, so but again, the facility
Speaker 1: would would separate some stuff out already, so you know,
Speaker 1: it's it probably would not remove the necessity for recycling completely,
Speaker 1: but it would reduce the uh, the importance of it.
Speaker 1: But we don't have them, so it's kind of a
Speaker 1: moot point. I mean, there's only a few facilities like
Speaker 1: this that exist in the world. They do exist there.
Speaker 1: It's not like this is just in theory. There are
Speaker 1: actual plasma waste converters out there. There's just only a
Speaker 1: few of them. You know. One of the funny things
Speaker 1: that happens when you start thinking about energy um and
Speaker 1: efficiency is you can look around the world and you
Speaker 1: can just see that energy is wasted everywhere. And I'm
Speaker 1: not talking about just leaving the lights on the kinds
Speaker 1: of ways that we normally think about wasting in g
Speaker 1: I'm talking about what happens to the energy, the impact
Speaker 1: energy when you put your foot down on the floor
Speaker 1: and you take a step. Yeah, you're you know, you're
Speaker 1: not You're not press the keys on your computer, you know, right,
Speaker 1: you're not doing any useful work, like you're not like
Speaker 1: things that things that are actually an expensive energy aren't
Speaker 1: being recaptured in any meaningful way. And uh so what
Speaker 1: if you could find a way to capture that energy
Speaker 1: so that all these little things we do throughout the day,
Speaker 1: but everyone pretty much does them, what if we could
Speaker 1: recapture that energy and put it to you know, some
Speaker 1: other use, like creating electricity. Right, is, people have already
Speaker 1: thought of doing this kind of thing in cars, right
Speaker 1: when you have like regenerative breaking, the brakes used to
Speaker 1: just just wasted energy and yeah, just friction and heat
Speaker 1: and that's all you would lose, all that enage just
Speaker 1: going out the window. But if you have regenerative breaking,
Speaker 1: the car manufacturers figured out, oh well, we can actually
Speaker 1: reclaim some of that energy, and you is it for something, right,
Speaker 1: which means that you extend the battery life of an
Speaker 1: electric car for example. So it's not that it's not
Speaker 1: that you're recapturing all the energy that you just used.
Speaker 1: You can't do that. You're losing some no matter what
Speaker 1: because entropy holds. But but you can at least extend
Speaker 1: the battery life that way by having regenerative breaking. So
Speaker 1: what if we could do that with ourselves, Like what
Speaker 1: if we could end up doing it where either we
Speaker 1: have something that's lining the floors or even in our
Speaker 1: shoes that could capture this energy. And you found something
Speaker 1: that was kind of interesting. Um that all has to
Speaker 1: do with a virus. Yeah, there's a phenomenon piezo or
Speaker 1: piezo electricity. I call it piezo electric, and everyone else
Speaker 1: calls it piezo electric. But you know what, but Jonathan
Speaker 1: smarter than me, so I can I call it pie pio.
Speaker 1: I'm just pie electric. I think that electric pie does
Speaker 1: sound delicious and and zappy. But but anyway, I probably
Speaker 1: pronounced it correctly, but I'm stubborn and I shall continue
Speaker 1: to do so. Whatever it really is, piezoelectric energy comes
Speaker 1: from pressure, right, So anytime you apply pressure to something,
Speaker 1: there is some kind of energy transfer going on there.
Speaker 1: And what if we can harness that energy? Well, it
Speaker 1: turns out there are ways to do this. Uh. In fact,
Speaker 1: I think you know, just like scales and stuff use this.
Speaker 1: And you know, if you look at a time piece
Speaker 1: that uses a quartz crystal, that's piezo electric prizo electric.
Speaker 1: It's it's a material that when you compress it, it
Speaker 1: emits electricity essentially, or if you induce electricity, if you
Speaker 1: give it electricity, it then vibrates. So it's that relationship there, right,
Speaker 1: it's a it's a relationship with mechanical stress and electricity. Yes,
Speaker 1: it's very good for making my stumbling actually sound smart. So, uh,
Speaker 1: you can imagine that. Oh, if we could put these
Speaker 1: generators just everywhere that there's wasted friction, you know, if
Speaker 1: you put them on stairs, around the soles of your
Speaker 1: feet or something like this, could you reclaim over time,
Speaker 1: um the energy costs that it would cost to create them,
Speaker 1: and could you could you even get a surplus? And
Speaker 1: so say I want to put paso or piezo or
Speaker 1: piezo electric fields on the bottom of my shoes, walk
Speaker 1: around all day and charge my iPod. Well, it turns
Speaker 1: out that you might be able to do something like
Speaker 1: that now. But part of the problem is um creating
Speaker 1: these things that we haven't reached peak efficiency yet. So
Speaker 1: at this point, in a lot of cases, it would
Speaker 1: probably cost more to create one of these and it
Speaker 1: wouldn't put off enough electricity. But we're getting better. Also,
Speaker 1: they tend to involve materials that you don't want to
Speaker 1: put into consumer electronics UM, like lead and stuff like
Speaker 1: that generally not good. But the lab that we were
Speaker 1: looking at figured out a way that you could create
Speaker 1: a small ocean of viruses, viruses that don't affect humans.
Speaker 1: Their bacterio phage viruses the bacteria, not people, right, and
Speaker 1: so they wouldn't be harmful to you. They they're the
Speaker 1: kind of viruses that eat the bacteria that's all over
Speaker 1: the sidewalk, you know, and everywhere. And thirteen specifically is
Speaker 1: the bacteria phage designation. Wow in thirteen. Yeah, that's I
Speaker 1: remember that now. It sounds like a British Secret Service
Speaker 1: does way behind him five. But yeah, So anyway, you
Speaker 1: can use viruses to generate electricity. They found out you can.
Speaker 1: You can make a little ocean of these and when
Speaker 1: you slap it, they put off electric current. So you
Speaker 1: connect that your you coat an electrode, exact stuff. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and every time you apply pressure compression to that electrode,
Speaker 1: then a little bit of electricity passes through it and
Speaker 1: accumulatively the starts to matter. So I mean right, yeah,
Speaker 1: it's when when you push it once I think I
Speaker 1: was reading upon it, and it only produces me a
Speaker 1: quarter of the voltage of a triple A battery, which
Speaker 1: doesn't sound a lot until you consider the fact that
Speaker 1: that you just you just made viruses into energy, right,
Speaker 1: and if you're if you're doing lots of steps, if
Speaker 1: you're walking a lot, and then you have these in
Speaker 1: your shoes, then obviously you're going to generate more electricity.
Speaker 1: Or if you have this as part of a heavily
Speaker 1: trafficked area, then you can harness electricity. I mean, you
Speaker 1: could even in theory, create a highway system in the
Speaker 1: future that would use something along these lines that could,
Speaker 1: through the amount of pressure being applied to it when
Speaker 1: cars are passing over, start to reclaim some of that energy.
Speaker 1: If you could paint this film onto a street, then exactly. Yeah. Well,
Speaker 1: we don't know where it would be efficient in the
Speaker 1: future to use things like this, and in fact, we
Speaker 1: don't even know for sure if we can get there,
Speaker 1: but it's really cool to try. Yeah. The nice thing
Speaker 1: about discovering things like this is that even if ultimately
Speaker 1: it turns out that your initial discovery is not applicable
Speaker 1: in any meaningful way, you can learn other things during
Speaker 1: that process that end up in forming other processes, so
Speaker 1: you make other things more efficient. Even if your initial
Speaker 1: approach ends up being a bust, you may find other
Speaker 1: things that help you out in ways that you had
Speaker 1: not intended when you started out, which is why I
Speaker 1: love science. I love the idea, and I don't think
Speaker 1: of sciences having think you will. You'll hear about a
Speaker 1: scientific study where you thinking like what's the practical application
Speaker 1: of the study? And pure science versus technology? And really, yeah,
Speaker 1: and I think that's the wrong question to ask, because
Speaker 1: if we only concentrated on things that we thought we're
Speaker 1: going to have a practical outcome, we would be so
Speaker 1: far behind where we are today. Today's pure science is
Speaker 1: tomorrow's technology. That's right. It's ridiculous that would thinking there, Joe,
Speaker 1: who would have thought that quantum mechanics would ever have
Speaker 1: a technological application? You know, a hundred years ago when
Speaker 1: people were talking about what these strange quantum states um?
Speaker 1: But now we're talking about quantum computers and quantum encryption. Yeah, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: there's definitely some emerging technology today that came out of
Speaker 1: pure science from a hundred years ago, and maybe in
Speaker 1: another hundred or two hundred years will be saying the
Speaker 1: same thing about something like string theory, where right now
Speaker 1: we don't even call that a science, We almost call
Speaker 1: it a philosophy because there's no way to test it
Speaker 1: or observe, but who knows, maybe maybe in a hundred
Speaker 1: or two hundred years that will be the genesis of
Speaker 1: something that really changes the world, like the Genesis Project,
Speaker 1: which is documented in Star Trek two Wrath of con
Speaker 1: All right, well, let's wrat this up. This is a
Speaker 1: good discussion about it. And you know, these were just
Speaker 1: three examples of some of the ways people have found
Speaker 1: to maximize that electricity generation while minimizing waste. And it's
Speaker 1: really cool application of ingenuity and technology. I really think
Speaker 1: that this is pretty amazing stuff. If you guys have
Speaker 1: suggestions for future topics for us to cover, I highly
Speaker 1: recommend you go to our website, it's fw thinking dot com.
Speaker 1: There you can watch the video series, you can listen
Speaker 1: to this podcast, you can read the blogs, and you
Speaker 1: can also connect with us on our various social platforms
Speaker 1: like Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus. And we will talk
Speaker 1: to you again really soon. For more on this topic
Speaker 1: in the future of technology, visit forward thinking dot com,
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