Energy Resources

Somebody, somewhere, had to decide what would be burnt or turned or heated to light the room you are sitting in. That decision was not made by a physicist alone. It weighed how much a kilogram of the stuff carries, whether it can be kept safely in a tank behind a building, what it does to the air of the town, what it leaves behind when the plant is dismantled in forty years, and whether it will still be there for your grandchildren. Every one of those questions has a physics answer underneath a political argument, and this lesson is about the physics.

You will learn to read a fuel as a store with a price tag: so many megajoules in every kilogram, kept in a particular way, dangerous in a particular way. You will keep an honest account of where those megajoules end up: so many reaching the job that was worth paying for, so many warming the neighbourhood instead, the two always adding back to what was burnt. You will see why two stoves burning different fuels can need six times as much mass for the same hot pot. Then you will step up to the national scale: what separates a renewable source from one that runs out, why renewable and harmless are not the same word, and what wave, solar and geothermal schemes are genuinely good and genuinely bad at.