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Every damn power plant is a glorified steam engine
Except solar. And wind. And hydro.
Expect for solar, it’s all just flowy stuff through spinny stuff: wind, water, steam. GRAAAAAAAAAA
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.
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.
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.
I wonder if nuclear would get more traction If it was pitched as enhanced steam power instead
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…
“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
Needs some ai in there
Done!
INVEST
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.I was thinking you could put giant fans on it to blow the clouds away, but then the moon would also knock it down once you got up that high.
What if… hear me out… we pipe straight up into space, and then use a 90° bend to angle the remaining pipe to the sun. Shouldn’t Be too difficult, but I bet those plumbers would charge an expensive ass trip fee.
~We’ll need a shit ton of that purple PVC glue though.~
Then we have to wait until the purple PVC glue goes on sale
How long is that gonna take? A few decades?
-Sam Altman, when he hears about this
Couple of years maybe … maybe longer
I know one person who will answer “two weeks”.
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’m curious if it would even be thermodynamically possible. If we could magically run a pipe that far, would the heat from the water radiate into space before it reached earth to do anything useful?
Someone get XKCD to do a video short on this.
What if instead of a pipe to return the steam we use a freaking laser beam!
So we generate energy with boiling water next to the sun, and we send the energy back to earth as a laser beam.
Guess how we turn the laser beam back into energy.
Because it would cool down on the way back.
We just have to pipe it faster
Reminds me of one of my favorite photos, a steam engine being delivered by steam engine!
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.
Well, hydro is just spinning water again, wind is spinning air. Solar is stealing electrons from the sun (i think?) So that’s cool
Well, the sun is sending them to us, so it’s not really stealing!
