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Every damn power plant is a glorified steam engine
Except solar. And wind. And hydro.
Some solar is also boiling water
And some of it is boiling salt!
Which then boils water, of course.
But some of it is electrons from photonic impact, no water involved! In the process of energy generation anyway. Statistically and perhaps somewhat ironically, the electrons from that photonic impact may well be used to boil water regardless… Humans just fucking love boiling water.
Isn’t salt like the main bees knees these days?
I don’t know, but the Ivanpah solar power station near Primm NV, which is a set of three molten salt towers is reportedly getting decommissioned, removed, and replaced with PV panels. Word is PV technology had improved in efficiency and stopped in cost enough that the whole molten salt thing is no longer economically viable, at least in comparison.
Oh, absolutely. It’s very cool technology! Molten salt is corrosive as fuck, but that just kinda makes molten salt solar towers even more awesome.
I’m assuming ceramics to the rescue?
:D
Something all the way down something
And zapping birds!
They did fix that pretty quickly, but what a classic mad scientist blunder that would turn a well meaning researcher into a villain in any action hero film.
And some fusion is direct to current in coils. The z-pinch style approaches mainly.
Expect for solar, it’s all just flowy stuff through spinny stuff: wind, water, steam. GRAAAAAAAAAA
Spinny stuff is basically the universe on all scales, so it makes sense. And that’s fucking cool, IMO.
And wind.
wind is just the effects of premade steam
Hydro also uses steam
In liquid form?
Condensed steam.
Isnt hydro in a small part powered by steam just post condensation steam.
I do enjoy a nice glass of post condensation steam on occasion
And theoretically a massive proton exchange plant.
Are these really power plants? I thought they were called field or farm or something else
We’re living in a steampunk world after all
I’m a steampunk girl
In a steampunk world
It’s not a big big thing if you steam me
Readily available, low boiling point, non corrosive (relatively), and ecologically safe. What more do you want?
Also a ridiculously high heat capacity. It does make sense.
Molten salt. Lower pressure, higher efficiency, and I believe less reactive in the event of an uh-oh.
The molten salt is used as the first step. It then makes steam through a heat exchanger. Molten salt is safer next to the actual reactor because water is not a good coolant in case of emergency.
Oh, I was just joking around. What my water system is missing is molten salt.
Although for the sake of preposterousness, I’m going to suggest we use the molten salt to turn a giant water wheel.
Hydro isn’t. Nor is solar photo voltaic, wind, or tidal, but yeah, nearly everything else is. In a combined-cycle natural gas or diesel plant half of the power generated isn’t steam power, but the other half is.
Hydro is liquid steam
aah, but it didn’t say steam, it said boiling water.
smaller gas generators based on internal combustion engines don’t boil water though, right?
Molten ice.
One of the fusion startups says they can use the plasma B field directly. Basically making the plasma the rotor in an electric generator to induce current in a wire.
I really like this concept, wonder how viable it really is though.
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It’s boiling water all the way down.
Seriously though, it’s over 100,000,000° so probably not.
Water decomposes above 3000 C
First, fusion has 0 theoretical economic potential, but there is some potential for energy gains from 2250* + steam. Water deconstructs above this temperature into powerful HHO gas, that when ignited gains another 2500* that will chain react with higher pressure steam to make the steam even hotter/higher pressure. Minor problem of melting all known turbine material, is avoidable through just higher volume of pressured steam.
Which one? My first impression is that ignoring all the energy in neutrons should be pretty inefficient
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m_CFCyc2Shs I don’t listen to Lex much these days, but that was a fun discussion.
Why don’t we just pipe our water all the way out to the sun and pipe the steam back to earth.
That’s silly.
Clouds would knock the pipes down.Then we have to get rid of the clouds
Because it would cool down on the way back.
We just have to pipe it faster
Oh yeah! I did that for my house. We have free heat and power. It’s a bit of a pain in the ass to build the pipeline that far out and it took me many more hours than expected, but, the system toots along just fine.
I wonder if nuclear would get more traction If it was pitched as enhanced steam power instead
“It’s a blockchain of an highly enhanced hydrogen process. Thanks to its AI quantum mechanism it manages to increase the energy output by a ton through its cloud.”
Just tell that to investors and they’ll gobble it up. /s
I wonder how fast we could get a steam train to go if we stuck a suitably shaped non-critical amount of plutonium in the firebox.
And replace the pistons with a turbine…
And replace the locomotive with a Delorean.
Then it’ll only get up to 88 mph.
As fast as it will roll down a hill. A non-critical mass of plutonium isn’t going to produce any significant heat for the boiler.
if we stuck a suitably shaped non-critical amount of plutonium in the firebox.
Non-critical? There isn’t much energy released from natural decay compared to criticality. We created things like this to power space probes like the Voyager I and II craft. 4.5kg of this Plutonium created about 2500w of thermal energy the the beginning of its life and the power declines from there.
So I need 80 tons of it in my firebox?
Well, you’d then have another problem. Unlike coal/wood/oil fuel, you can’t turn off radioactive decay.
You’d have megawatts (gigawatts?) of thermal energy boiling off all your water pretty quickly, and likely eventually melting down your steam engine firebox, and it would be that hot for decades!
You can boost it by hollowing out the middle and filling it with tritium, but plutonium is dense, so 80 tons will probably fit in the firebox just fine.
but plutonium is dense, so 80 tons will probably fit in the firebox
I feel like there’s a thing that will happen when I put that much in such a comparatively small place.
It’ll heat up the firebox, which is exactly what the firebox wants to happen. It’s not like we’re using precisely-timed explosives to briefly make the mass much more than critical and counter its desire to blow itself apart for long enough that it blows other things apart, too.
Nuclear Powered Steam Locomotives
Pros:
- Looks cool as hell.
- Only needs to be refuled every 25 years.
- It’s a steam locomotive.
- It’s a steam locomotive.
- Did I mention it’s a steam locomotive?
Cons:
- Have to replace the fireman with a nuclear engineer.
- Still have to stop to grease bearings and take on water periodically.
- Hazardous radioactive materials.
Pros clearly outweigh the cons. What are we waiting for?
Low key this is a great way to convince people to switch away from fossil fuels.
Most people seemingly don’t know that coal/gas stations work by essentially boiling water. Most are horrified at how trashy and underdeveloped the concept is compared to high tech alternatives like solar, wind, or hydro.
You can transfer gas to electricity without boiling water. But it is much more efficient to combine it with boiling water
Reading the comments, it would seem most everyone here thinks that the usefulness of the steam is done when it gets used to turn a turbine at high pressure.
The steam can be used for much more than once. In the 1800’s and early 1900s when steam ran trains and ships, they built double and triple expansion engines that took the energy of the steam two and three times before it was done. It doesn’t need to be one and done. And when the energy is done being harvested for power generation, it can used for other things. Engineers today aren’t dumber than the ones in the 1800s.
I can remember a small rural Minnesota town that had their own coal fired electric plant. (Built back before the REA was a thing). They took the left over steam from power generation and then piped it to around 200 homes in the town and heated them with the leftover steam. While a bit costly to install, it was dirt cheap to run. Those homes lost all that when the power plant was shut down and they had to switch to either natural gas, fuel oil, LP, or electricity.
So don’t get hung up on just the power generation. Think what could be beyond that point.
Municipal steam networks are still operating today.
For new infrastructure, Electricity is just so good-enough, that it is hard to justify building out partial alternatives like steam pipes. But where we already have them, they are still useful.
Also the water is just a medium for energy transfer; it can be reused & recycled in near perpetuity in a closed system.
We’re used to open systems with water in power stations, including cooling towers etc, because water is abundant on earth so it’s cheaper to just dump it back into the atmosphere; we probably take the whole thing for granted.
But it could be engineered to be a closed system a bit like a coolant in a refrigeration unit cycling back and forth. And it probably will need to be a closed system in the future in space where water will be incredibly precious.
The same principal has been tried with crypto mining to reduce waste / cost.
Capture the heat and use it elsewhere like to heat the building.
Downside for heating buildings though is unless you’re doing it somewhere where it’s always cold, you eventually still end up with heat you can’t use, and at that scale, there’s better heating choices. I heard the city of vancouver was looking into heating a swimming pool with it, at least that would have a constant use.
Then you still end up with the issue of the mining cards only being good for 2-3 years before the tech improves and they aren’t mining efficiently anymore, which then just leads to more e-waste.
But imagine if the cards themselves had a really long useful life or were super cheap and easily recyclable, we could put miners in things like space / baseboard heaters which were already going to be doing resistive heating and then gain something from that instead of just heat.
Imagine doing something like having a GPU based baseboard heater that folds proteins whenever it’s on, where it doesn’t become completely obsolete in a couple years. If the chips were cheap enough it’d be way better than just doing heat.
Edit: Taking the idea further… imagine if governments mandated reuse of the heat generated by data centers instead of piping it outside? You want to build a data center here? Build a public pool and heat the building / water with your excess heat. Then that commercial zone also gets a fitness center for anyone nearby.
Steam had several technical and power limitations. It was dropped very quickly when electrification was an option.
A good example of how you can do amazing things with steam is looking at the very last of the steam locomotives. Before they switched to diesel or electric, the steam locomotives were engineering masterpieces. Yes, you still got the classic steam locomotive puffs of steam coming out of the locomotive, but they only let the steam go once they had extracted the maximum possible energy from it.
Here’s a good video going over the whole design.
Hydrohomies!
We need this on lemmy
We have it already! ^^ <3
Living somewhere that makes 90+% of its electricity from hydro, I am slightly confused.
“Dyson Spheres? Look, playing with sunlight and mirrors was a fun side project, but you want to know a much more advanced method of generating power?”
“Please dont…”
“Thats right! By hurling entire water worlds into a star, we then capture the released steam which powers our gravitationally locked dynamo network.”
Throwing water into a star wouldn’t get you steam, it’d just fuel the star XD
You gotta seal the planet in a heat-safe bag, and make sure to not drop it out of orbit, or you’ll lose the water, as you say.
Nah. You’ll probably want several shells operating above any sane temperature for steam. You don’t want to lose that extremely high temperature by just heating water to 600 °C or so.
There are actually versions of fusion reactors that use the magnetic fields generated by the plasma in order to make electricity directly.
use cherenkov radiation to power photovoltaic array.
Yeah but photovoltaic has a yield of less than 50% even for the best panels. Lots of waste there, compared to steam.
What is the peak efficiency of steam turbines?
Supercritical steam is nothing to fuck with. Even old school sub critical steam will happily kill you as if it were fire instead of water.
Edit
Utility steam turbines operate with inlet steam pressures up to 3500 psig and exhaust at vacuum conditions as low as 2 psia
Damn
It’s always been about finding new ways to spin a turbine
Why is that a problem, exactly?
It’s not really a problem, it’s just funny that so many forms of power generation we have are just boiling water to make steam that spins turbines.
It only feels odd because that is genuinely an incredibly effective means of generation, and we found it very early on because steam is so fundamental. Nothing wrong with sticking to the best method ever discovered.
Solar concentration is boiling some other liquid, so there’s some variance 😅
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People with no actual experience in electrical generation on large scale.
Just pipe the electroplasma directly into the workstations. Sure, sometimes this results in dangerous overloads during adverse conditions, but that’s what the Cordry rocks are for.
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