Use of Silicon as a Fuel
by Paul A.L. Hall
(c) January 2002
Nuclear power has gotten a bad name these days as something only the highly financed or the foolish dare tamper with.
But in actuality, nuclear power is used every day by every entity in the physical universe. Whew. I guess that just about covers it. That reminds me of the joke about the town where they had an advisory against covering chicken coops. The logic was that if anyone did so, that person would risk being tarped and feathered. Then how come we don't see mushroom clouds all over the place? Because it's COOL nuclear power. And that's just as well, because there's no cool like an "oh, cool!".
Here we are in a solar system with eight planets, a giant asteroid with a moon (and probably lots more of them out there and a huge asteroid belt between the rocky planets and the gaseous ones. It's time for us to examine some of the properties of the solid objects in that asteroid belt. With such quantities of these minor astral bodies in such proximity to one another for so long, there are other forces at work on them to prevent them from forming a large planet much like the others.
Of course it could be something simple like multiple collisions of several planets with shared orbits, but there still should be much more activity in that region unless there are forces of repulsion balancing the forces of attraction. If these forces exist, or others, a better understanding may allow us to eventually use forms of them to do work or perform tasks. For example, assembling asteroids into a rocky planet, driving it to a star, parking it in orbit and terriforming it. And then using that solar system as a space vehicle to explore neighboring galaxies.
When working in menial jobs, I noticed that there was actually a form of nuclear energy in the geometric reality of a card board box. To begin with, the element behind this energy was largely carbon but that wasn't all there was to it. There never is. Better understanding of the energy patterns around me, of course, enabled me to better perform my tasks.
Energy tends to be expended in the presence of both catilization and form. The determination of expended energy is useful depending on how it is observed and subsequently put to use. It's not the hot burning of the carbureted fuel in the internal combustion engine that powers the car, but rather the cool nuclear energy of the cohesive power of the cylinder walls of the engine block. Some cars run on alcohol and that would be "N-Gin".
Now if Wal-Mart ever realized I was using nuclear power to perform all that work I did in the back room as well as with those prefab furniture units that come in boxes on the floor, they would have been as upset, probably, as they were when I pulled fifty shopping carts to the door with my aging '85 Subaru. I got written up for that one, whereas I thought they would have been impressed with my demonstration that use of motor power to retrieve shopping carts would improve safety and be more economical.
Customers were always in a quandary and amused when I explained that I didn't need assistance (there usually wasn't any anyhow) to move a very heavy boxed item safely and with complete control. They usually were astonished as though I was next going to pull a rabbit out of my Wal-Mart baseball cap. Smoothly and safely, the large heavy object would glide onto it's transport and subsequently into their car after purchase.
Cool energy tends to not be expended, but it still can perform and does perform work in any situation. The existence of cool energy, for example is the element of unpredictability in meteorology.
In the case of the box, the first thing I used was the corrugation of the layers of paper in the structure itself. Then I used the geometric structure of the box in conjunction with my own reasoning to couple the cohesive cool energy of the corrugation with the reality of the surroundings, as was the usual case in the back room, other boxes. The area of greatest energy in the box was the section past the arc tangent to any one of the three sides of the corner and facing towards the corner in a proportion of approximately 1/75th of the entire area of it's larger sides. Occasionally, in the absence of surrounding structures, I used the cool energy of my own skeletal system in that case using both carbon and calcium.
Cool energy is the most extensive use of nuclear power in nature. What is the ecological measure of the respiration of a tree as compared to an animal it's size, such as a sorrapod to keep it standing in a static position? Look at the energy it would take a dipalodoctus to stand still compared to an oak tree? Probably the energy is equal but one is measured in respiration and the other is cool power, whether it be as an organism of as lumber in a structure. Parts of the mammoth were used for structures such as huts: it's bones, which also contributed the cool energy to cause the organism to stand.
Now one tends to think of nuclear power as that alchemist's disaster, the fission of the heavy element uranium and also that of plutonium. I go over some of that topic in my paper on the radio active half-life of nuclear waste. In the paper, I propose that it's possible to lessen the time nuclear waste remains radio active from fifty thousand years to about a couple of weeks. Radio activity is not the only aberrant nature of matter. Certain conditions can cause matter to change it's perceived realities or it's inherent laws of physics. This is something I tend to describe as the coherence of relativity.
The relativities of an object's (or any mass's) surroundings have a unique effect upon the characteristics and demeaning of that object. For example, placing a portion of food in refrigeration extends the time that portion remains edible. Another example is the noticeable difference in accent of a language in different geographic locations.
It's so embarrassing when one considers the funding and time afforded to those who developed the so-called nuclear reactor and what they came up with! A radio active tea kettle. I have only one question and that really doesn't require an answer concerning that and it is who got bought off? That's not what I would consider to be good science. One useful non-scientific axiom is that if they can make a movie of it, it's useless.
As you have noticed by now, I have taken the liberty to broaden to definition of nuclear power to go beyond the heretofore misguided use of nutronic power as in uranium to include every thing about the atomic structure and it's relative moleculizations as this is certainly it's proper connotation. And without accurate connotation, usage is always limited. Among other things, this necessarily takes into account the interactive relation of the electron with the nuclear material it comprises in any mass.
Taking this in a certain perspective, one immediate usage of this cooler version of nucleonics would be prevalent in common molecular bonds such as that most common form on the surface of the Earth, SIAL, or granite. Comprised mostly of silicon and aluminum, these solid elements could then form the two constituents for a kind of fuel when separated by the producer and recombined by engines operated by a consumer.
Stable molecules such as those found in the lithosphere have the potential of exerting uncommon and distinctive forces when isolated in their atomic constituents and then in specific molecular forms that will allow them to recombine in controlled manors in specifically engineered engines. They would therefore tend to exhibit determinant forces rather than explosive or combustive ones. For example, the determinant force of hydrogen hydroxide when going from a liquid to a solid. Although that is simply because of it's lattice in a solid condition, it is still demonstrating the phenomenon of cold nuclear power in one certain way.
The fact observable at this instance of granite or even basalt is in the latent energy that is already employed in forming the bond as well as the availability of the substance. The rest of the prospect comes in the laboratory as the science is done to investigate the hypothesis.
But it would seem in order that the introduction in some way of the equal amount of energy to the proportionate cohesive energy of the molecular bond would render the elements separate and useful to be reunited as a fuel in such a way that the reunion would expend sufficient and proportionately exponential energy (in mass to reaction) in some adaptable way to perform work needed to be done. For example, locomotion.
I can see it now, the rockmobile. Move over, Fred, Barney and Wilma, here comes one from New Hampshire, the "Granite State"! Of course this may not be possible at all, or maybe even probable yet unfeasible. However. Where you have matter, you have potential energy. After all, matter is light divided by energy. For example, tungsten under an electric charge. So, any immediate guesses about the two solids of granite, silicon and aluminum being useful as a fuel?
One way this may be accomplished is to unite the two elements of silicon and aluminum with more unstable substances such as nitrogen. After all, gasoline is mixed with oxygen in the atmosphere, and there's much more nitrogen up there, right? Another way is to produce the mechanism necessary to partially inhibit the bonding of the elements to be utilized to cause the bonding to perform work.
In this suggestion, bear in mind that I'm taking into consideration the abundance of the two elements and the usefulness of the compound, granite. Solid fuels may not be cumbersome as one might think, after all, look at the huge volume gasoline takes because it's a liquid and it combines with a gas which may mean that it's power is so much lessoned by the spacious properties of the carbureted mixture.
How to take it beyond this observation and postulation to actually doing what is proposed would involve subsequent scientific investigation as well as undergoing sufficient engineering to produce the prototypes that would demonstrate any feasibility of the concept. The main purpose of this discussion is to note that the entire previous century was built around the cheap and plentiful petroleum power and how that it replaced the need for slavery to construct empires. Yet these technologies of the past may be taxing limitations today.
It behooves us to stop acting like a bunch of kids shopping for fireworks. It's time for us to stop spending all our efforts toying around with the easy stuff such as harnessing volatile compounds or using prevalent atmospheric substances. It's time for us to grow up and do the science and deal with our homework and make some real discoveries for a change and leave the toys for the history of the childhood of man and for memory of the tinkers of the twentieth century.
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One of the already existent applications of silicon for energy
Paul A. L. Hall
Copyright © 2003 [Paul Hall]. All rights reserved.
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