This is reminds me of a quote from one of the Encased loading screens.
To paraphrase it “Power generation before was about turning a turbine with steam. Under the Dome we have this fancy technology that we use to…turn a turbine with steam.”
Reminds me of the meme using the Donnie Darko psychologist template.
Donnie: I made a new form of power generation.
Psychologist: New or steam?
Donnie: Steam…
Steam implies water! What if we used some OTHER phase-change working fluid? :D
||(No idea what, though. my question is implied with a playful tone and is at least 50% facetious; any actual discussion that might result would be little more than a pleasant coincidence)||
Tag yourself! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Refrigerant
You want to see weird water look up super critical boilers. That stuff was nasty. A regular steam leak will set things on fire. That stuff would explode a broom. We looked for the leaks with straw brooms. You can’t see steam in normal conditions. Only its effects.
Blech, I’ve heard stories in my industrial automation days of people being clipped by invisible high pressure steam leaks. No frickin thank you, regular stovetop steam jacks me up frequently enough.
Well, now this is on my list of invisible things that scare me:
- Radiation
- Methanol fires
- Supercritical steam jets
Not quite invisible but you could also splash and wade into a pool of strong acid thinking it was water, during what first seemed like a somewhat routine FUBAR maintenance situation…filling your boots etc.
Molten salt?
We can then use compressed CO2 in the place of steam to drive the turbine.
Like Dr. Pepper?
Nuclear power is just steampunk with magic rocks.
Nuclearpower is just boiling waterHydro?
Nuclearpower is justboilingwaterSolar?
I bet there is a way more efficient way to harness it that we are just missing too lol
So a nucler reactor is just a kettle with an extra spicy heating element?
Most power generation is just steam spinning turbines. Solar’s just weird. Wind cuts out the steam loop.
Reflective solar is normal at least. But photovoltaics are weird. Even weirder is that they’re LEDs backwards, and the fact that transistors just are like that is why they’re encased in black plastic
Yes. Water + spicy rocks. Everything else is solar power, which is also nuclear power, but with the spiciness in the sky instead.
Fun fact. Coal plants release more radioactive materials than nuclear plants.]
Except the ones that blew up. Those ones were extra spicy.
Except, even then, an average coal plant will release more radioactive material over its lifetime than Fukushima did.
It’s just Chernobyl that you have to top. And even then there are coal plants that come close.
Now, it’s not apples to apples. Coal plants release uranium and thorium. Not ceasium and strontium.
But yeah, never go swimming in a coal plant ash pit. For more than the obvious reasons.
How many average coal plants per Chernobyl though. I suspect that number is surprising lower than the total number of coal plants.
I mean, radioactive isotopes are formed in supernovae, so it’s really just solar power from a different sun, right?
it’s spicy rocks all the way down.
All power is nuclear power when you keep digging, whether rocks come into play or not!
Not spicy. Everyone knows nuclear power is lemon-lime flavored.
Taste: slightly metallic, not great, not terrible.
A plausible Nile Red quote.
Cherenkov: The blue raspberry of nuclear radiation
That moment when you take a drag of your Blue Raspberry vape and the dosimeter next to you maxes out.
No! I vanted orange!
The same guy who deliberately messed with the vending machine will also intentionally misplace the delivery of the skull gun aug module, smh.
The best part of this game is that this conspiracy theory is incorrect. Fema killing Americans, illuminati, majestic 7, area 51, MIB: all real. Workplace persecution for a distrusted wounded war veteran?: crazed paranoia
That’s not a spicy challenge id be willing to try.
It was interesting realizing that a lot of our power is still, at its core, a steam engine
More like a steam turbine (which is way cooler cause it’s like a jet engine). Steam engine makes me think of a piston engine like on a train.
We discovered a banger like 400 years ago and have held on tight until eight about now with wind/solar/hydro.
Still going to be using them geothermal/fission/fusion for at least another 100 years though.
Hydro is just more dense steam, wind is less dense steam, it’s steam engines all the way!
The only really new kinds are thermocouples (mostly garbage) and solar panels (poor efficiency, but abundant fuel).
Some fusion might end up using magnet pumping, which is basically just a plasma powered piston.
Don’t skip the betavoltaic battery, (or the brand-name: Betacel), which turns beta-radiation directly into electricity. They used them in the 70s to power pacemakers, since batteries were kinda shit back then, and implanting Prometium into people is just too epic not to do.
Nowadays we have tritium-decay betavoltaic batteries, on satellites, buried or underwater sensors and probably some too secret military stuff.
Ooo, good call.
There’s also radioisotope piezoelectric generators, where the electrons are caught by a cantilever and then released in regular pulses. An electron waterwheel if you will.
The best solar panels are getting at or above the efficiency of converting nuclear heat to electricity (about 1/3) so they probably shouldn’t get that poor efficiency label.
Some cells are getting 47%, which is ridiculous for a generator! The theoretical maximum efficiency for solar cell from the sun as it appears in the sky is about 68%, so that’s pretty good!
However, how expensive is that cell going to be? How much maintenance does it need, and how fragile is the system once deployed? It’s very obvious that PV efficiency has beed skyrocketing recently, and I don’t thinks it’s stopping soon, but a commercial PV panel available today is just breaking 20% efficiency. Luckily, sunshine is quite abundant.
Not OP. I guess it depends on the frame of reference. Comparing to other inefficient methods it might seem OK :)
Seems to be just photovoltaics and spinny things.
Mechanical engineers fist pumping after finding out their entire profession is not yet obsolete
Nearly all power generation comes down to boiling water to steam which spins a turbine.
I can only think of two common exceptions off the top of my head. Solar is an exception and Hydro power is an exception ironically, that usually uses the vertical difference and gravity to spin the turbine.
One could even argue that hydro power is just boiling water, letting it condense, and then letting it spin a turbine
I’ve never heard of Hydro power boiling water. Usually hydro power is natural or pumped storage.
You’re just taking water from an upper reservoir and dropping it to a downstream river. Either a naturally-filled reservoir/lake, or a pumped storage reservoir where you use other cheap power during low usage periods to pump that water to a higher reservoir to utilize later. The pump doesn’t heat the water, it just moves it uphill to utilize later, like the Taum Sauk Hydroelectric Power Station in Missouri.
They were speaking of the water cycle. It’s the naturally-filled part. Not necessarily boiled, but evaporated.
I know that… I was taking liberties to take hydroelectric power to its furthest logical extension by saying that the sun is evaporating (boiling) the water, it goes through the water cycle, it is deposited atop mountains or further upriver, and it then flows back down through the hydroelectric stations.
Wind turbines also.
But some solar does focus it on a tower to make steam to drive a turbine.
deleted by creator
Yeah, who would have guessed that modernity was invented by someone who stuck magnets to a fidget spinner and strapped it to a boiler.
Piezo electricity too. It’s very seldom used for power generation but does exist
Wind? And binary cycle geothermal plants but not sure how common they are.
deleted by creator
“what if fire… But… MOAR”
And then there are thermonuclear generators
God damnit Jinyang!
Errich, is the refrigerator running? This is Mike Hunt, and he’s a rich.
“This is you as an old man. I’m ugly and dead alone.”
Eric Bachman, this is your mother. You are not my son.
plus a side of extra spicy landfill
That’s from building nuclear weapons though, not power
There are some fusion designs that use direct energy conversion.
Some work went into fission designs as well.
The issue is that boiling water is inside human bodies
Nuclear power is the refining distilling and enriching of uranium into unstable isotopes and higher elements, boiling water is one small step in converting nuclear energy into electrical energy.
But it’s one of the most important steps because it’s where the actual electricity comes from.
into unstable isotopes
No, they were there all along.
I heard that somewhere in the US there were parts of a nuclear power plant being delivered by steam train. So that’s basically one steam engine supplying another! (^^,)
I can’t seem to find an article about it anywhere, so it might be an urban legend :(
Given that the first commercial nuclear power plants in the US were coming online in the late 1950s, that’s entirely possible. Steam trains were well on their way out by then, but there were still a few hauling freight around.
Fun adjacent fact: even when the British Empire had moved off of wind sails and into coal, those coal ships didn’t have the range to possibly cover the entire Empire. Coal stations were setup around the world, and the coal had to be transported by sail. The previous technology helps get the next generation technology going.
Sail ships continued to be used well into the 20th century. The absolute last purely sail powered warship served during WW1!
Big Steam is playing us for suckers!
They’re just spinning us in circles!
