What if We Replaced Nuclear With Potatoes
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 7 มิ.ย. 2024
- This video was made in partnership with Gates Ventures.
Energy use can be confusing - I mean, how do you compare gasoline in your car to electricity piped to your house? That's why we made these things spud-tacularly simple.
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To learn more about this topic, start your googling with these keywords:
- Calorie: the energy needed to raise the temperature of 1 gram of water through 1°C (now usually defined as 4.1868 joules).
- Energy: power derived from the utilization of physical or chemical resources, especially to provide light and heat or to work machines.
- Joule: the SI unit of work or energy, equal to the work done by a force of one newton when its point of application moves one meter in the direction of action of the force, equivalent to one 3600th of a watt-hour.
- Watt: the SI unit of power, equivalent to one joule per second, corresponding to the power in an electric circuit in which the potential difference is one volt and the current one ampere.
- Watt-hour: a measure of electrical energy equivalent to a power consumption of one watt for one hour.
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REFERENCES
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“All-Electric Vehicles” (2017) www.fueleconomy.gov/feg/evtec...
“Apple’s Electricity Use 2020.” Statista, www.statista.com/statistics/5...
“Statistical Review of World Energy.” BP Global, 2021, www.bp.com/en/global/corporat...
“Cameco U101 - Fuel Manufacturing.” www.cameco.com/uranium_101/fu...
“FoodData Central.” Usda.gov, 2019, fdc.nal.usda.gov/fdc-app.html...
“This Is What It Costs to Light 7 of the Brightest Landmarks in the World for a Year.” Business Insider, www.businessinsider.com/the-c...
Ritchie, Hannah, et al. “Energy Production and Consumption.” Our World in Data, 2020, ourworldindata.org/energy-pro...
"The shipping industry looks for green fuels." Acs.org, 2022, cen.acs.org/environment/green... - วิทยาศาสตร์และเทคโนโลยี
I'm not gonna lie, after he said the potatoes would be deep enough to cover Idaho and started the next sentence with "85% of those potatoes..." I thought he was gonna end the sentence with "Are already IN Idaho."
i thought it was "85% of those potatoes... is the enery we use"
Latviaaaa, Irelaaaand
Edit:why is this getting liked bruv
As a non-american, what I learned from this video is where Idaho actually is
@@datpanu3015 Idaho is in the USA
I thought that was already in Idaho
I dunno if I trust that guy in red, I've seen too many impostors
you posting this comment 20 hours before the video was made public is sus
@@TheRealBFKelleher premium guy is the imposter
This one's spotted in electrical (in a power plant), he's fine.
Sus
Since the kids have stopped playing Among Us so much, I guess old folks like me are finally allowed to get the references ;)
"How much power does a nuclear reactor make?"
"About 800 MW"
"No I mean... in potatoes"
Potatoes per second?
@@BrainPermaDeD Potatoes per 2 hours
4.17 million potatoes per hour
@@TimpBizkit Or 8.34 million potatoes per 2 hours.
and then the potato war begun not the energy war but the POTATO WAR
I like how this was sponsored by Bill Gates and therefore called out Apple for their energy use and not Microsoft.
Well... Apple MAKES their physical products. Microsoft doesn't. Other companies make the physical devices on which MS software runs. But did you ALSO know that the bulk of the physical hardware that serves the internet uses LINUX software? So that is neither Apple nor MS.😃
Plus, if you normalize Apple's energy usage by dividing by the number of people it serves, it's way less than a potato per person. But that's not impressive so they misuse the scale to make it big.
I don't like Apple for many reasons, but their energy use isn't anything to worry about.
@@rickkwitkoski1976 It would be pretty weird for a software or hardware vendor to take responsibility for the energy usage of their products. This figure is probably their offices and servers, with manufacturing likely delegated to a subsidiary. Large scale datacenters companies like Microsoft or AWS operate can probably account for the majority of energy usage of the entire tech sector.
This kind of energy use plays an important role, so it shouldn't be brushed aside, since their monopolistic efforts and limitless scaling have created plenty of induced demand from the enterprise sector.
Though, tech manufacturing may very well be one of the most energy-intense industries, making any efforts by companies like Apple to stop proper repair of their products or even the act of marketing a newer model a direct source of e-waste and all of its environmental effects, including the production of newer devices that would have been otherwise avoided.
@@rickkwitkoski1976 You forgot MS Azure. Their lots of servers consume a huge amount of potatoes every minute.
@@rickkwitkoski1976 Microsoft has several branded devices
Everyone's talking about the among us reference but not how efficient chainsaw man aki is at living a low potato life
Exactamente lo que pensaba
Exactly what I was thinking
I've been searching the comments section for that exact comment, thank you. for a minute i was worried and thinking "isn't it Aki there? or I've been watching too much chainsaw man content lately?" lol
The comment I was looking for!
I was waiting for a Lord of the rings reference.
radioactive potato is mighty.
ppl don't realize how efficient and safe it is compared to the alternatives.
I read somewhere that the most dangerous radioactive source of electricity is coal. Living near a coal power plant is much worse in terms of radiation compared to living near a nuclear plant (and obviously much more worse than living close to renewables)
xkcd 1162
@@Ghi102 yeah coal has been in the soil for a long time, naturally occurring radioactive materials like vanadium infiltrate it and when burned gets released into the surrounding atmosphere.
also you should ventilate basements since radon can collect there.
What's funny is normal potatoes are actually fairly radioactive, potato chips are one of the most radioactive things we regularly eat.
@@creamofbotulismsoup9900 they not above bananas as far as I know.
Ya know, the Apple computer example seemed kinda weird until you mentioned the sponsor lol
bill
Why would it be weird?
Apple is largest/wealthiest company in world.
@@LENZ5369 just had to look it up. Apple with 365 billion VS Microsoft 168 billion net worth.
@@christopherjohnston6343 I know, it's so depressing. So tired of Apple and their everything... (I've been biased against Mac and all the other Apple products since always. Hated that their system had annoying interface and only a single button on the mouse. Then it only got worse with their locking batteries in phones to force consumers to use their battery-changing services rather than let them just swap a battery themselves.)
@@LENZ5369 Because it does not make sense, what does it even mean "the whole apple company uses X amounts of energy"
Many things aren't good in this video, especially around 2:30, where they mix up primary energy, final energy and useful energy.
If the authors intended to consider the whole primary-to-useful energy chain, starting with 85% (for fossil fuels), removing 2/3 of this to obtain 28%, and then comparing it to 2% nuclear energy is wrong, because to end-up with 2% energy for nuclear, you also need to start with 6% nuclear in the initial energy balance.
Of course, if you do that, the initial balance doesn't add-up to 100%.
And I don't expand here on the renewable part, for which the primary-to-final energy conversion ratio is more tricky and depends on the meaning we expect from the percentage.
Or maybe the authors meant to talk specifically about the final-to-useful energy conversion? Then there's still an inconsistency in the fact that they use a yield of 1/3 for fossil fuel.
This yield would correspond to the final-to-useful energy conversion when the useful energy is under the form of movement.
But movement is far from being the only useful energy in the mix, heat represents more or less half of the useful energy, and is not subject to the 1/3 yield.
The authors seem to believe that the 1/3 yield is due to the energy resource supply chain (primary > final energy), which is absolutely not the correct order of magnitude. They disregard the second law of thermodynamics (this is corroborated by 1:00, where they essentially attribute the engine yield to... friction!?)
Finally, call me picky but "13% come from renewable like solar panels, wind turbines, or hydroelectric dams"... Although not wrong, it gives the impression that solar panels and wind turbine are the main renewable sources. At world scale, they are marginal. The main renewable sources are biomass (for heat - yes, again), and hydroelectric, by far.
The idea of the video, namely, to provide orders of magnitude, is great. Too bad this passage gives an incorrect representation of said orders of magnitude in the energy mix.
I cringed as soon as I saw the "KW/h" instead of kWh at 0:24, the science is really bad for a wannabe science channel this big
they dont get paid to you. but to brainwash you into accepting the spending of billions of taxpayer money in nuclear
Yeah, another problem is that chemical energy stored in a potato is not same as energy usable for the human body. Humans can't extract all of the energy that's present in the potato.
Smartest renewable energy enthusiast
What the f### is this this is so BIG!!!!!!
The reasons your car loses 80% of it's fuel to heat is because that's that maximum efficiency of gas powered engines. I took a class on thermodynamics where we calculated the maximum efficiency of engines based on their properties. Diesel engines are much more efficient because they have higher compression.
its funny to think that even with all the losses, EV are still way more efficient than ICE. and they even used a conservative efficiency for the power plants, some modern fossil fuel power plants can go as high as 90% efficiency.
@@danilooliveira6580 they also grossly overestimated the ICE consumption. even using their own numbers in the foot note, 8.6 x 60 miles (30MPH for 2H) is 516. plus 22 MPG is pretty low. i get 38MPG at 30 MPH and i drive a '19 Altima, that works out to 300 per 2 hours, which is pretty comparable to the 240 EV honestly.
Plus you dont get to pick where your power comes from, so the number they use would have to be an avg of the entire grid. 40% seems fair.
For the record, it should be kWh instead of KW/h. The former is the product of a rate (kW) and time (hours). The latter doesn't make any sort of sense.
Well, it describes the rate of change of power, which I guess could be useful for quantifying how quickly a system can ramp up/down.
@@Dayanto true, its analogous to velocity vs acceleration
I just wanted to comment on this...
It's m/s not ms
So on that note its kw/h
@@destroyerofminecraft3249 nope, you're wrong. m/s is meters per second - it's division. kwh is kilowatt-hours - it's multiplication
The second I saw that among us in the thumbnail I nearly had a heart attack, thanks minute earth!
After seeing the video, I can say that that is a lot of potatoes.
Looks like adventure communist was onto something making you gather billions of potatoes, maybe they were planning on taking over the world? Who knows?
They changed the thumbnail, which is rather sus. We should vote red out for that.
did not see that...
They are taking not over the world but over Idaho
getoutofmyheadgetoutofmyheadgetoutofmyheadgetoutofmyheadgetoutofmyheadgetoutofmyhead
I saw it immediately as well
Idaho has an area of 216,632 km². That's a bit larger than Belarus' 207,500 km² and Guiana's 214,970 km². Just converting the measurement to a more global audience.
muito obrigado. pegar um país da américa do sul, e outro da europa realmente ajuda a visualizar melhor =)
Looks like Aki has both of his arms in the MinuteEarth universe.
Bro I thought I was the only one who noticed
same
What do you mean both?
@@Lucien_Mhe lost his arm :D
A friend asks: If we can measure fuel usage in potatoes, how much energy would we get in a potato serving of uranium?
2:42
Simply: from a potato sized chunk of uranium, we get 350000 potatoes worth of energy.
1 green potato = 350k potatoes
1 g of uranium is about 1,000,000,000 cal
Funfact: the trace amounts of uranium present in potatoes have more energy than the potatoes themselves.
@@wren_. so don't eat uranium if you're on a diet?
@@vaclavzajac214 In a research made by the National Library of Medicine; Toxicological Profile for Uranium, a gram of Potatoes has 2.66-2.92ng of Uranium.
Actually "1,000,000,000cal per gram of Uranium" is a bit misleading because that is for U235, and most of the Uranium in the world (99.3% to be more specific) is U238, which has only 400,000,000cal per gram.
2.92ng * 400,000,000cal = 1.168cal/g (Uranium in potat) < 770cal/g (Raw potat)
2:42 WHEN THE POTATOE ENERGY IS SUS
e
a mongus
I physically went "DING DING DING DING DING"
(to the tune of amogus drip)
Friction is only one part of the reason for ICEs low efficiency. The laws of thermodynamics make up a large portion of it as well. IIRC it's not practically possible for an ICE to be more than ~50% efficient due to the laws of thermodynamics alone.
Yes, thank you! From what I remember from my thermo classes, 50% is a theoretical maximum if very high temperatures are possible. With modern cars, something like 30% efficiency is possible at the ideal RPM with the throttle wide open. In practice 20% is typical because throttling the intake requires extra pump work.
@@abev236 throttling, sitting idle, accessories, low loads, inefficient gear selection.
As Michael Schellenberger says --- your entire energy needs for your whole life, can be contained in one coffee mug of Uranium. The energy density of Uranium and with Nuclear (vs chemical) energy is just off the charts for people to grasp
0:15 IS THAT AKI FROM CSM??😂
0:21 I think you mean KWh. KW/h is kilowatt per hour, which is kilojoule per second per hour. KWh is an amount of energy: 1 KW delivered for 1 hour. KW is the rate of energy, it is energy per time or in SI Units: 1000 (cuz Kilo) joules per second. Multiply this with a unit of time (like hour😉) and you get energy, hense KiloWattHour, not KiloWatt per Hour.
Depends on what that image is meant to convey. If it's meant to show the confusion many people have when thinking about power and energy, it's a perfect illustration. :)
My father keeps making this same mistake. He doesn't even get it when I explain why it's wrong. Now I just interpret what he says without mentioning it, but on the inside I cringe every time XD
2:13 ah,the idahoan dream
YOU GUYS HAD ALL THESE POTATOES THE ENITRE TIME AND YOU STILL LET THE POTATO FAMINE HAPPEN
Is that a chainsawman reference at 0:08 looks like Aki Hayakawa
Oh yeah he's reading a newspaper 00:43 it's definitely him.
Yaaaa It’s Aki. They should’ve put denji there too
Def him
Meanwhile in Russia: "Welcome to power plant...is potato."
0:25 KW/h as a unit of energy? 😮
Well... Is how energy comapanies charge us, isn't it? :P
Edit: Mistakes were made! As pointed in a posterior comment, I thought about KW*h even thought what was actually written was KW/h. A 'square hour' mistake, if you will. ^^
Sure is 1000 W * 1 hour = 3.6 MJ
Actually you are the best kind of correct, technically, In the video it gets the unit of energy wrong as kW/h
@@guiguspi no you are charged kWh which is power • time not kW/h which is power ÷ time. The former measures energy, the latter measures the second derivative of energy but would never be used instead of the more standard J/s^2. (Its the equivalent of position amd acceleration, one is measured as m the other as m/s. To my knowledge we only have a name for energy and its first derivative which is called power.)
@@jasonreed7522 You are corret, I read W*h where was actually written W/h.
In winter that "waste heat" actually becomes useful.
in summer tho you will suffer
Sure, but it's still not as efficient as a heat pump (so don't intentionally replace LEDs with incandescents). And if you're still producing that heat in the summer, it puts an extra load on your heat pump, so it's a wash unless you spend more of the year heating than cooling
I dont think i would trust a person in a red spacesuit he's kinda sus
Techno blade has enough to potatoes to power a rocket
Break down that is done is remarkable, and much more relatable than kcals, joules
The fact that on the back of the car said"POT8O" shows the little ditails they put into these videos!
So what I’m getting from this, is if I drink enough oil to fuel the shipping industry for 2 hours, I’ll have enough energy for 8.4 billion hours, which is almost 1 million years?
Sound like a good idea😂
No, fuel oil is poisonous and you would die
Yuck! Drinking that type of oil sounds disgusting. No, what he is talking about is plugging your electrical devices into potatoes. I did that with my tablet a few hours ago and its
Longevity hacc unlocked 🤣 /s.
@@davidroddini1512 and its? What happened? Are you still alive or are your devices broken or something?
@@oddpotato4038 his tablet exploded before he could finish his sentence
I can't believe you did electric cars like that. What a sweeping generalisation.
sussy mogus in thumbnail!!!!!!
Americans really will use any unit to avoid metric
You know exactly why you got more clicks.
That was pretty clever
I wonder how many clicks (on a Geiger counter) a radioactive potato would generate? 🤔
When you said it was sponsored by bill gates, the bashing of apple in particular taking too many potatoes of energy suddenly seemed to have a different purpose.
why there is a among us in this video!!!!
I love how they make a video then change the title and the thumbnail a few hours later
its something a lot of youtubers are doing now, they keep trying different titles and thumbnails to see which one is blessed by the algorithm, then they just stick with the one that gave better results.
Meanwhile the main topic in Ministries of Energy in Latvia, Belarus and Ireland:
Ah yes, the potato battery. Thanks Portal.
I like the potato analogy. It's a great way to convey energy consumption.
Honestly I always knew nuclear power so much more efficient. It just needs to be funded and regulated more in rural areas away from hot spots to avoid disasters.
0:22 shouldn't it be kW *times* h?
Mre intriguing question: how much potato/rice can one cook on a nuclear reactor?
you say"useless heat", but i hear it as soul-soothing entropy
The biggest reason why combustion engines have such a bad efficiency is not the friction. All thermodynamic engines have a maximum efficiency based on the highest and lowest temperature of the thermodynamic process. Search for "Carnot efficiency"
You forgot to mention the better Uranium Alternative Thorium. Sam o'nella would not be pleased.
You should do a video on what if we lined all the freeways with native trees and the effects that can have on are citys and are health.
This would be interesting as a minute labs tool
*sees thumbnail*
GET OUT OF MY HEAD GET OUT OF MY HEAD GET OUT OF MY HEAD
PO-TAY-TOES. boil 'em, mash 'em, burn 'em to power your stuff.
Considering a potato is 94% water it's not a good reference to fuel, cooking oil would be a better comparison
2:47
among us?
What an informative video genuinly very interesting.
Nice vid, MinuteEarth...!!! 🍟😋💯👍
Replace nuclear with potato
Meanwhile Lay's: Gentlemen potato chips gonna be more profitable
Sure X uses this many potatoes per 2 hours, but how many people does that provide for? What's the potato per person for 2 hours of a powerplant? Also, what percentage of the potato a person eats get turned into heat? Just felt like the metric of what is being compared wasn't constant.
How would you calculate the number of people a powerplant provides for? Sure, you could take the mean annual energy consumption of a typical household. But that would be scewed again, since most energy goes not to households but to industry. And how would you factor in how many people that industry provides for?
@@lonestarr1490 But that's my point. One potato is not equal to another.
@@felixthecrazy Yeah. But they're more equal than what we're calculating with now. That's the point of the video. It doesn't claim that potatoes are the perfect means of energy measurement. If they were, we would already be using them as such.
"there are too many units of energy, so let's introduce another one... potatoes"
a single car vs. the whole global shipping industry seems a slightly biased setup
'So if you genetically modify a potato to not only be very delicious but also up to 10 or 20 potatoes can charge up a generator to give electricity to a huge concrete jungle of a city.' - Chrome
Then Irish Potato Disease would cause all of our lights to go out.
And the more you look into it, the more chaotic it gets.
You also have to take into consideration the energy needed to create, transport and maintain all the components of all those different things, and then to see where the raw resources came from.
It's a never-ending rabbit hole.
Interesting, simple and easy
I doubt a lot that the dissipated heat mostly comes from friction in a combustion engine. Most of the heat should be created by the combustion itself and then the heat is dissipated through the oil cooler, water cooler, and the exhaust gases.
*throws a glowing green potato at you*
"RAD POTAT!!!"
You’re really mashed this topic into the ground keep up the great work
Yes
Now I'm feeling a hankerin' for some french fries.
"potatoes have energy in them"
Me who hasn't ate potatoes in a week: EFFECIENT
Skyblock: Potato War 4
(RIP Technoblade)
I was searching for this comment
Uhhh, I feel strongly a follow up to this video is needed: an episode dedicated to electric car energy usage and how it compares to that of internal combustion engines.
Would love that too
Seems the comments already said the energy savings from electric are already immense.
im curious about the gas car numbers? at the bottom it says 8.6 potato's per mile @ 30MPH for 2 miles, or 60 miles. but 8.6 x 60 is only 516? Also 22 MPG is pretty low for a modern car. My 2019 full sedan gets about 38MPG at 30 MPH. at ~190 potato's = 1 gallon of gas or right at 5 potato's per mile, i'd burn about 300 potato's to go 60 miles.
Loving the aki hayakawa haircut.
I lost it when I saw him RIP
aki fights the energy bill devil
Lmaooooo
Energy bill devil def an avengers level threat
Which is more efficient, combustion engines or oil fueld boilers?
There's a sussy Among Us in your thumbnail!
HOLY FUCKING SHIT IS THAT AN AMONGUS REFRENCE??????
Per ton per mile, container ships use fewer potatoes to move cargo than any other transport method.
Aki does like his potatoes.
I thought this was somehow a way to generate electricity from potatos !
Just burn them and call it biomass. "It's renewable, technically, we promise."
We need to calculate the number of potatoes used in refining oil, too.
Thank you for this interesting video, but that illustration at 1:23 is very misleading, as it suggests that combustion takes place inside the cooling tower which completely wrong. The only thing that happens in a cooling tower is that hot water evaporates. Nothing is burned, no toxic gases are released.
I see the character and I immediately think “Aki from Chainsaw man”
Bc it is lol
Nice reference, idaho, sure everyone on the world can relate
Presenting the new Unit of measuring Energy in fuels...
*Potatoes*
The main loss in internal combustion engines is from thermodynamic limitations and utilizing them in inefficient regimes. transmission losses are not too bad (they are present in EVs, too).
That nuclear potato looks mighty sus.
I want Idaho to be covered in taters
I can’t believe minute earth made a chainsaw man reference 0:37
Cant unsee potatoes as the only energy source in the world rn
I read a book that always compared energy to what our bodies get from a comparative number of chocolate chip cookies (I think it was Energy for Future Presidents). Anyway, nuclear power is far more efficient than gasoline, but the hitch comes in how we power our reactors. Uranium dioxide fuel rods only utilize about 2% of the material before we have to remove it and replace the fuel rods. There are more efficient means of energy production in reactors--even using uranium--but thorium is a proven way to utilize far more energy density. An interesting fact is that burning gasoline uses only about one billionth the rest mass energy of the fuel (think E=mc^2 versus igniting the gas in an engine). As potent as gas is, it's barely taking advantage of its energy density. Nuclear power generation still isn't much compared to pure energy transference (since we don't have antimatter engines), but it's still way better and environmentally friendly than any fossil fuel. If you're using thorium, you solve or nearly negate pretty much every bad aspect of uranium based power, so the benefits are even greater.
Back in the days a german Expedition to antarctica used live penguins as fuel when stuck in the ice for months
That guy in the thumbnail is the Sussy imposter
0:58 This is almost backwards - ironically, the more accurate explanation sounds even worse. The whole mechanism of the engine is trying to convert heat (and pressure) from the burning into motion, so producing "heat" doesn't have to be a waste. But car engines are just really bad at converting heat into motion energy, and it gets less efficient the faster you try to do it. Even in theory, you can only get ~2/3 of the energy to convert into motion. But then a ton of the heat is simply wasted out the tailpipe because it's too much of a bother (time, space, complexity) actually maximize the harvest.
As a person from Idaho I can confirm this is what our cars run on
That a great idea
I bet they where using Potatoes aa a excample specifically for the pun at the end xD
I did not understand a thing, but good art.
This is dumb but genius at the same time.
Ok, so potatoes aren't too efficient as a fuel source but what about corn?
I say cucumbers are the most efficient
I like this potato unit.
Should be the new standard like "horse power".
Girls when they're bored: why can we survive cold better than beat?
Boys when they're bored: Potato...