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Q&A

How could indestructible materials be used in power generation?

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Background:

In this scenario assume technology is initially equal to our own, but a method is discovered to render material indestructible. The affected material is treated as requiring infinite or arbitrarily high amounts of energy to break any of its bonds whether they be nuclear or chemical (this does mean a previously radioactive material will no longer be able to decay).
Indestructible material can deform provided this wouldn't require breaking bonds or stretching them beyond what would have been possible for the starting material.

The process to make something indestructible costs hundreds of millions of dollars per cubic meter affected so answers should be limited to scenarios where using such an expensive material makes financial sense. Making an object indestructible involves placing it in a sealed reaction chamber and applying the Mcguffin effect to everything within, so you can't make only part of a contiguous object indestructible.

The process to make a material indestructible can be applied to any substance, provided you can get it in a sealed reaction chamber long enough to flip the switch. The effects on things like gases and liquids are somewhat variable and require thinking about things on a molecular level. For instance liquid water forms hydrogen bonds between molecules. So once it is made indestructible those bonds will no longer be able to break turning it into something akin to non-crystalline ice.
While this process does make any pre existing bonds unbreakable, it doesn't necessarily forbid indestructible material from forming new bonds (though these new bonds wouldn't be unbreakable). Additionally the bonds made unbreakable here are those within nuclei (and smaller constituents) and the chemical bonds within atoms. However electrons not engaged in a chemical bond can still be move around or be lost normally.

My Question: So how could these aforementioned indestructible materials be used in conjunction with existing or near future technology to improve power generation?

At the very least though I'd imagine there's great utility for power generation in taking advantage of this Mcguffin's ability to easily contain extreme pressures indefinitely (emitting energy through radiation, heat emitted by the vessel and light if the vessel is transparent).

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This post was sourced from https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/143057. It is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.

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How could indestructible materials be used in power generation?

Energy storage.

If you can spin a flywheel to relativistic speeds on indestructible bearings using electromagnets (in vacuum), then you can use that flywheel as a lossless energy storage device.

enter image description here

Wikipedia 2019 - CCSA License

The energy density would be infinite (or limited by the unspecified arbitrary high amounts of energy in the question) - thus you would need a microscopic minuscule amount, a nano-flywheel mounted on gimbals - radically reducing the price per flywheel and opening it up to mass marketing, totally outclassing all battery tech available today.

Not only the obvious solution to the supply and demand issues with windpower, but for vehicles - cars/planes, phones, power-tools, toys, mobile phones and of course space exploration.

Infinite energy storage in the size of a grain of sand.

Miniature Tactical Nuke:

Of course, this section is about political power generation.

To release all that energy in one instant - perhaps an object charged with just below the threshold of it's (unspecified arbitrary potential energy) capacity, could be placed near an enemy stronghold and fed that last few joules of energy to tip it over the edge, that's the dark side, someone will find a way to weaponise it for sure, if not the leader of some isolationist sanctioned state, then a disaffected teenager.

Power of a civilisation through time travel.

Speculatively: Also it would have potential to enable time travel or at least the potential to send messages back in time as it would exhibit frame dragging. For a few hints on how this could be of tactical use see this answer to another question.

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