Nuclear Fusion, Perpetual Motion, and Renewable Energy

• Title: Mechanism for a bell tower clock with verge escapement and foliot

• Creator: Unknown, Northern Italy

• Date Created: 1451/1500

• Physical Location: Florence, Museo Galileo, inv. 3934.

  (found image on arts ands culture)

I missed my regular Thursday post last week - I’m still working on it. I’m doing a little more research to do it justice. It will be about the desperate supply situation for rare earth minerals caused by the trade war with China, and how it affects EVs, wind turbines, national security, and investments. Also, a few words about the ongoing risk of fires in EVs and container size lithium batteries.

In the meantime, I got distracted by a post from Tuco’s Child, titled “Renewable Energy Does Not Exist”. I commented:

“Of course, you're right, in a literal sense. But words take on slightly different meanings depend on how they're used in a changing culture. "Renewable" energy is a term commonly used, not in a literal sense, but figuratively, because the sun 'comes up' every day, for free. (Praise God!) And when the wind blows, that's also free.

However, your real point is perfectly true - harnessing the sun's energy or the wind so we can get some use from it is not free. Entropy is increasing with every energy transaction. A simple understanding of entropy is that the friction and waste heat is not re-usable - so there is a cost to every energy transaction.

Usable energy is not free, but some methods of capturing it are much more efficient than others.”

This got me thinking about other follies in history. The impossibility of ever getting free energy compares with the alchemists’ quest to change lead into gold. About the time that thought popped up, I received an email news item from LiveScience, once again harping on how close we are to achieving nuclear fusion and the pipe dream of “limitless energy” from nuclear fusion.

“A recently concluded experimental campaign at the Wendelstein 7-X stellarator at the Max Planck Institute for Plasma Physics (IPP) in Greifswald, Germany has smashed previous fusion records and set a new benchmark for reactor performances. Nuclear fusion offers a tantalizing promise of unlimited clean energy.”

I’ve expressed my skepticism about nuclear fusion before, here (on alchemists) and on the science, or lack thereof, here

I can’t resist one more comparison - the time and energy expended in the search for a ‘perpetual motion machine’.

Leonardi-da-vinci and perpetual motion - from arts and culture

“The oldest European reference to a perpetual-motion machine is a drawing of an overbalanced wheel—clearly influenced by Arab models—in the notebook of Villard de Honnecourt, a 13th-century architect from Picardy…

The manuscripts by 15th-century Italian engineers show their attempts to apply the concept of perpetual motion to operating machines…In his De ingeneis, the Sienese Mariano di Jacopo, known as Taccola (1381-ca. 1458), describes the overbalanced wheel with articulated arms depicted by Honnecourt and in Arab manuscripts.

He also provides diagrams of overbalanced wheels and of what appears to be a wheel with moving arms and buckets for excavation. Another Sienese engineer, Francesco di Giorgio (1439-1501), explores the topic of a recirculation mill.

He draws a hydraulic motor connected to a piston pump or an Archimedes’ screw that was supposed to be powered by the force of the falling water raised by the motor itself.

Studies by the young Leonardo

The young Leonardo was fascinated by the drawings of recirculation mills that he discovered in manuscripts by other engineers, and he studied the subject thoroughly. He imagined basins that would be filled with water by automatic means.

Eventually, he imagined full-fledged hydraulic power plants composed of several wheels powered by the millpond fed by the basin into which the water would be conveyed by Archimedes’ screws or pumps driven by the motors themselves.

Leonardo seems to have realized the difficulty of achieving perpetual motion, for he increased the complexity of these machines in an attempt to find the solution that would keep the entire system in motion.

In the first half of the 1490s, Leonardo abandoned the notion of recirculation mills and began to study wheels overbalanced by mechanical means (with moving or oscillating spheres) or hydraulic means (systems using Archimedes’ screws to raise and lower water). He designed several versions and probably also built models. However, he concluded his studies by rejecting the possibility of perpetual motion. Identifying gravity and attrition as the forces that made it impossible, he compared perpetual motion to the alchemists’ quest for the transmutation of metals.”