Options for biological high-density energy storage within the human body

I've got my wizards, who operate by vanilla human biological laws and metabolism. They've got an organ in the pelvis which has its own mechanism - not breaking the laws of physics - which stores energy in some form, and allows rapid dispension to use for their spells.

What this means is that they have a biological battery, storing energy for the long term (weeks), which they can convert at will into some dynamic form. That can be combustion heat, electrical energy, or something else - which my organ (this is the only handwavy part) will turn into magical energy, and magic.

Here's the numbers, and many of these have some wiggle room if necessary to make physical sense:

• The organ weighs no more than four or five kilograms. Not big enough to displace too many existing organs, and not so dense to upset mobility. A wizard should not constantly feel pregnant.
• The organ can store up to 200 megajoules of energy.
• The energy can be released in as little as five seconds.
• Ideally, the elements composing this energy battery should be able to be produced in the body - or at least composed of materials found in human nutrition. So organic fuels like petroleum are fine, but plutonium is out, because a human living in a pre-industrial era could never acquire any.
• Ideally, the energy should be possible to be released in doses, but it is not required.
• It's fine if the organ's energy medium takes weeks to produce, since that's how long it takes to metabolise fat and nutrition to charge it up anyway. Only the discharge needs to be fast.

Now, what options are there for high-density energy storage that allows rapid discharge? Electrical energy was my first bet, but the densest real world batteries allow maybe a single megajoule per kilogram, which is two orders of magnitude below what I want to accomplish.

Gasoline has this kind of energy density, but I do not know if you could combust it rapidly enough. Are there any other options?

posted over 4 years ago

KeizerHarm‭

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