UNLIMITED ENERGY
by Jim Kaness

I am not sure anyone in our lifetime will figure out how to power the whole city from just one landfill but it has intriguing possibilities!

In my book CREATION I point out that light had to be created on the first day of creation by God because until the speed of light was determined God could not create any matter out of pure energy. In 1905 Professor Albert Einstein announced his famous formula E=mc² showing that relationship.

Having heard most of my life about E=mc² (Energy equals Mass times the speed of light squared) it finally dawned on me that I had no intuitive feel for just what that meant. How much energy is there in a pound of matter, or how much matter is there in a kilowatt-hour? And what is this energy process called?

A handy webpage helped me better understand the subject.

One kilogram of mass (about 2.2 pounds of mass) is equivalent to 9 x 10¹⁶ Joules which is the same as 9 x 10¹⁶ watt-seconds.

9 x 10¹⁶ watt-seconds equals (9 x 10¹⁶ ) / 3,600 seconds/hour equals 2.5 x 10¹³ watt-hours or 2.5 x 10¹⁰ kilowatt-hours.

Southern California Edison tells me that our suburban home here used 307 kilowatt-hours of energy last month. That amounts to 307 x 12 equals 3,684 kilowatt-hours per year, on average.

Doing all the math tells me that 1 kilogram of mass, if converted into pure energy, would power our home here for (2.5 x 10¹⁰ kilowatt-hours) / ( 3,684 kilowatt-hours per year) equals 6.8 x 10⁶ years. That's over 6 million years!!!

This process is called Nuclear Fusion and is the "holy grail" of energy research. At this writing we do not know how to make practical use of it. See Nuclear Fusion webpage.

I am not sure anyone in our lifetime will figure out how to power the whole city from just one landfill but it has intriguing possibilities! For more on this go to Energy From Nuclear Fusion .