Green Power: Burning Bunnies

Green Power: Burning Bunnies

by A Person | Published on October 15th, 2009, 11:18 am | Life

The Local

Problem: Stockholm is being overrun with bunnies, a problem that originated when people released bunnies in the city who did what bunnies do - bred like rabbits.

Solution: shoot those wascally wabbits.

Problem: So now you have a big pile of dead bunnies. What to do with them?

Solution: ship them to the power station to be burned as fuel.

Now every step is quite logical, and it certainly makes more sense to burn them than put them in landfill, but something seems wrong.

Surely the Swedes know that rabbit is delicious? Issue trapping licenses and eat the meat and harvest the fur. A new cottage industry.

Solution: ship them to the power station to be burned as fuel.

Rabbits, like humans, are about 2/3 water. Wouldn't that make them endothermic, i.e. require more energy to burn than they release?

The energy content of flesh varies from around 15 kJ/g for muscle to 40 kJ/g for fat. The latent heat of vaporisation of water is 2.26 kJ/g.

So no, burning an animal isn't endothermic. The energy required to boil off the water is much less than the energy released by the burning flesh.

Course, if you dry them out in the sun for a couple of weeks, you can get a pretty impressive bonfire going. Or so I've heard...

Warning icky images

Just look up 'wick effect'

I take the "icky images" warning seriously. I'll just skip it today, thanx.

Me thinking about this.