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energy

As a Dyson prize winning wind turbine goes on display in our Tomorrow’s World gallery, Margaret Campbell discovers how it could be used in built up cities and whether it could help lessen a city’s carbon footprint.

How about this for a sound business proposition? You spend £25 million excavating a 1‑kilometre tunnel and a cavern the size of the Royal Albert Hall deep inside a solid-rock mountain. At the same time you create an artificial reservoir with the capacity of 4000 Olympic swimming pools way up high on a barren Scottish mountainside. Then you install four giant turbines inside the mountain so that the water from the reservoir can flow through and generate electricity for the national […]

In the latest of our blogs linked to The Rubbish Collection, Curator Sarah Harvey talks to Nick Mills, Waste Innovation Manager at Thames Water about what happens to our sewage and what the future holds for wastewater. Sarah: What do Thames Water do with our sewage? Nick: We have 350 sewage works and 68,000 miles of sewers across our region, which stretches from East London to the Cotswolds in the west. Last year, we removed and treated 4,369 million litres of […]

The second phase of Joshua Sofaer’s The Rubbish Collection art installation has involved tracing the journeys of the Science Museum’s rubbish, to find out where it goes, and how it is processed. This has enabled us to work out what materials to bring back for display, and in what quantities, to represent 30 days’ worth of Science Museum waste. Rubbish leaves the museum via a variety of different companies but the vast majority is taken by Grundon Waste Management. It […]

This post was written by Tara Knights, a work placement student with the Research & Public History department  from Sussex University’s MA Art History and Museum Curating. This is the third installment in a series of blog posts where we have been exploring the lives of our ancestors by looking at a collection of tool bags from the Science Museum’s collections. This time we will be looking at the mining industry. We might think we’re fairly familiar with the tools […]

This article was written by Ben Russell, Curator of Mechanical Engineering  1712 was a red letter year for humankind: for the first time, rather than just relying on wind, water, or muscles, a new energy source became available: the steam engine. Thomas Newcomen of Dartmouth took the earlier, and rather ineffective, steam pump by Thomas Savery, christened by him the ‘Miner’s Friend’, and expanded it up into a truly practical industrial machine that harnessed the power of the atmosphere. The […]