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I am creating a relatively hard sci-fi video game that takes place in the year 2147, and am trying to make it represent a future that might be completely realistic. There have not been that many advances in physics and technology in my world, save one. Recently a new chemical element (I haven't decided it's number, and I might not put it in the game) called pretorium was discovered. It was first created near pretoria, South Africa, and it is on the island of stability, with a half life of millions of years.

I would like the people of my world to have a method of storing energy that is so efficient that they can easily and compactly put away as much energy as they would like to with minimal losses, and if possible, I would like it to be enabled by the discovery of pretorium.

What could be an efficient method of storing energy that the people of a near future could plausibly create without obviously violating the laws of physics of the real world? (possibly utilizing this new element.)

Futuristic energy storage methods that scientists have actually speculated about would be good.

Again, this energy storage technology doesn't have to feature the element, I am just giving some context.

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    $\begingroup$ (And the previous element at a predicted island of stability, 114, had a half-life of 30 seconds. Much longer than the milliseconds or microseconds of its neighbours, but we're still talking a short-lived and fantastically radioactive element.) $\endgroup$
    – jdunlop
    Commented Apr 30 at 23:43
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    $\begingroup$ @jdunlop they aren’t mutually exclusive. It’s well within Worldbuilding “hard physics” tag to ask “what happens to physics if I introduce this new force/element/tech?” $\endgroup$
    – SRM
    Commented Apr 30 at 23:57
  • $\begingroup$ @SRM - sure. But I'm not calling out the tag (which the OP does not use. And there's no hard physics tag, just hard-science), but rather the title, "near-future, hard sci-fi game". If you're claiming "hard sci-fi" and also "Oh, and I mined this new chemical element on Earth", that's mutually exclusive. $\endgroup$
    – jdunlop
    Commented Apr 30 at 23:59
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    $\begingroup$ What kind of energy do you want out, under what circumstances, how fast? A sip of water, a rifle round, and a AA battery have about the same volume, mass, and energy. The water can release heat (into a <0 degree environment) when it freezes. The battery can maintain a potential difference across a power-dissipating resistor. The shell can make some rapidly expanding gases when struck in the right way. Making a better sip of water won't make it any more useful to pour water into your gun. A better shell still won't run your flashlight. $\endgroup$
    – g s
    Commented May 1 at 1:31
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    $\begingroup$ jdunlop. I get that, in the real world, a half life of millions of years is a big stretch for an element above 118, but as the existence of an element with such a half-life cannot be objectively and completely discounted, it is good enough for the background lore of a videogame. $\endgroup$
    – ACertainArchangel
    Commented May 1 at 13:37

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Perhaps Pretorium has a stable nuclear isomer that can store a lot of energy for a long time, and is easy to trigger to release that energy, making it ideal to be used to make a nuclear battery

If nuclear batteries can be perfected, they would have an energy storage capacity on the order of a million times that of chemical energy storage batteries.

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    $\begingroup$ I love this idea of a nuclear battery. People have actually talked about the possibility of nuclear batteries providing energy storage at the level that I am looking for, and it is very easy to make it believable with a new element with the right properties. Thank you. $\endgroup$
    – ACertainArchangel
    Commented May 1 at 13:24
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    $\begingroup$ Wikipedia says “It may be possible to create energy stores that are 10^6 times more concentrated than high explosive or other traditional chemical energy storage.” and sites a scientific paper! $\endgroup$
    – ACertainArchangel
    Commented May 1 at 13:43
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Frame-challenge. This is a science-fiction answer to a science-based question. I wrote it that way because the constraints of the elements on the projected island of stability as science knows them wouldn't allow for a hard-science answer as the question states the OP wants.

U-High Temperature Superconductors.

At the moment we're working towards high-temp. superconductors that can work at 100 Kelvin (minus 280 Fahrenheit, minus 173 Celsius) and generate a magnetic field of as much as 20 Tesla. These will be great for supercolliders and help quite a bit with fusion energy.

Your pretorium is way better than that. It works at room temperature and above. It can generate intense fields of 2000+ Tesla. This will enable friction-free bearings for ultra-high-energy flywheel energy-storage - possibly in the range of Mega-Watt hours per kg. (The best Li-ion batteries at present can store circa 230 Watt-hours per kg).

This would also necessitate the flywheels being suspended in gimbal-mounts, else the gyroscopic effects can get problematic when the Earth turns, or if they're mobile, when the vehicle turns.

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    $\begingroup$ I really, really wouldn't want to be carrying one of those flywheels around. $\endgroup$
    – jdunlop
    Commented Apr 30 at 23:26
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    $\begingroup$ Nor I. Terrorist's wet dream having those available all over the place @jdunlop ~3,000 times the energy of C4 per kg. $\endgroup$
    – Escaped dental patient.
    Commented Apr 30 at 23:35
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    $\begingroup$ Also worth noting that even if you can dispense with the bearings, your energy limit would then be determined by the tensile strength of the flywheel material itself. I can't imagine anything that can sustain megawatts/kg, but maybe some sophisticated carbon structure? An unprecedentedly large buckyball? $\endgroup$
    – jdunlop
    Commented Apr 30 at 23:50
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    $\begingroup$ I suspect you're spot-on, but I'm rather hoping the OP comes-up with a solution to that, possibly including materials that currently seem impossible. The pretorium seems to be halfway there. @jdunlop $\endgroup$
    – Escaped dental patient.
    Commented Apr 30 at 23:56
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So if the element was discovered in the future and it is on the island of stability, this element must have an atomic number above 119 and is a theoretical element.

As stated the pretorium has a half-life of millions of years, but the expected Half-Life of theoretical elements is of milliseconds and less.

And for storing energy there are 3 ways:

  • Chemical energy

The most energy-efficient chemical reactions convert merely ~0.000001% of their mass into energy.

The pretorium could have new proprieties for forming chemical bonds, therefore storing much more energy per molecule.

  • Nuclear fission

Nuclear fission, for example, converts ~0.09% of the fissionable mass into pure energy.

If the pretorium has an absurd mass this would be very efficient, it could operate like a thorium mar (molten salt reactor) using an unnatural isotope of pretorium with a shorter half-life.

  • Nuclear fusion

For every four protons that fuse into helium-4, ~0.7% of the initial mass is converted into energy

The pretorium could be able to fuse with itself to generate isotopes of itself, with other applications in society.

  • Thermal energy storage (TES)

Carbon has one of the highest melting points of the element permitting that it can be used as a TES, storing electric energy as thermal and emitting as light afterward. So the pretorium could have an even more ludicrous melting point. The downside of this method is that those batteries are impractical in space because of the heat.

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    $\begingroup$ Fusion of pretorium would more resemble fission. Since almost any products would be ridiculously unstable. $\endgroup$
    – Gault Drakkor
    Commented Apr 30 at 22:47
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    $\begingroup$ Also, fusion in a superheavy element is going to be enthalpic. That's why fusion chains in stars end at iron. You'd need more energy to make it fuse than you'd get out. $\endgroup$
    – jdunlop
    Commented Apr 30 at 23:21
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    $\begingroup$ (Also, chemical, fission, and fusion are not the only way of storing energy in matter. As mentioned in the other answer, plain ol' kinetic energy would work fine too.) $\endgroup$
    – jdunlop
    Commented Apr 30 at 23:25
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    $\begingroup$ Fusion with itself wouldn't create isotopes of the fused material, and would be energetically infeasible. Nuclear reactors do not need isotopes with shorter half lives. Thermal storage would be fine in space (because heat loss via radiation is hard), though it seems the least useful thing to do with a highly refractory material. Did an LLM write this? $\endgroup$
    – Starfish Prime
    Commented May 1 at 7:23
  • $\begingroup$ @StarfishPrime I believe that TES in a spaceship is a great weak point. What is LLM $\endgroup$
    – Khorzin
    Commented May 1 at 17:30
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Don’t store energy. Transmit it. Your petorium could provide a perfect receiver for laser-transmitted EM signals, so as long as your satellite/tower network is nearby, devices can operate. I think this is an easier way to get power on demand for devices without the danger of carrying nuclear fusion/fission devices on your person, regardless of how efficient they are.

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An island-of-stability element is likely to have extremely high mass density, so just make the stuff so heavy and hard that it makes the general idea behind those ridiculous concrete-block-crane grid-scale energy storage systems actually feasible to use by letting you use one block of reasonable size instead of a ton of huge blocks that have to interconnect to fit within a usable space.

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    $\begingroup$ I like the accepted answer better, but +1 for a good idea :) $\endgroup$
    – ACertainArchangel
    Commented May 2 at 14:15

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