finallyHasANickname's Journal: Cool Things about Simple Thermodynamics

The New York Times seems to have quite a few tsk tsking editorials about the deregulation of electric power. Now it seems that the focus is greatest on the carrying capacity of the "big" wires. The sitting governor of New Mexico (also former Congressman, former Hahvahd professor, former Secretary of Energy and former UN ambassador) Bill Richardson, was a quiet proponent of distributed generation while still at the helm of the U.S. Department of Energy. If we would have followed "his" course, then this would not have been as much of a problem, but, alas, Five Supreme Court Justices thought (implicitly) better of the idea a few months later.

Now our friends fear us more, our enemies fear us less, and our power is faltering. Pun intended.

Remember the good old days when Republicans used to run on the platform, "The government should do a few things and do them well."?

Oh well. There is always an excuse, but I (as if a Republican reshaping the world without its consent), digress. (FWIW, I think it is morally justifiable to liberate Iraq, but at the time of this writing, it is also a pain in the butt to get UN support for reconstruction with a cowboy in charge.)

Speaking of oil, ...

I was going to say fun things about Simple Thermodynamics. Stirling engines and Stirling cycle heat pumps are neat, extremely neat. Because they are ideally hermetically sealed (and typically as close to hermetically sealed as is practical), the working parts of them are neat for a very long time. Everything you ever wanted to know about Stirling engines and heat pumps but didn't yet research for yourself is probably more than you can afford the time to study, but much of it is in the public domain, and there is a mountain of expired patents of viable Stirling technology. (Just remember to spell it with an "i" where you want to put an "e"!) Stirling technology (like its concurrently developed reciprocating steam technologies) inherently works nicely with external combustion. For that reason, engineering cleaner combustion or solar concentration is hassle free. Furthermore, the specifications of the fuels are liberal. You name it: solid, liquid, gas, slurry, effervescent mixture or solution. In principle, even nuclear power and other exotic exothermic processes could work. (Disregarding economic considerations, a plain resistor heater could also work with electric power as the input.) Then again, nuclear power generally disregards economy anyway. Funny how it all works. If a bunch of heaping forest residues were lit ablaze in controlled circumstances with a Stirling engine's butt collecting the heat, that could not be feasible politically. However, as the left and right tear each other's eyeballs clean from their sockets, neither side can see that the subsidies flow toward uneconomic nuclear power while we worry about "too much fuel" in the forest floor. Meanwhile, some alien is laughing in outer space as he/she/it looks through a telescope and somehow listens to what we say.