It is pretty funny that as advanced as our technology gets, we’re still basically just at the higher end of the “steam engine” phase.
I explained this to my oldest when he learned about the steam engine and how cool it was. When I told him it was the peak in power he was like “but we have nuclear and gas” and I told him that nuclear power is basically just a super charged steam engine, and nuclear rods boil water better than coal or gasoline, but it’s basically a steam engine. I went over how gasoline in cars was basically the same, but instead of steam, it used tiny explosions. We watched a few how it’s made type videos.
But I don’t WANT to boil water, I want ELECTRICITY. Like, future electricity!
Nooooo! I want different electricity. Not calculator electricity.
I want REAL electricity!
[sad Sterling Engine noises]
I remember when this was explained to me and my little mind was blown. Your comment reminded me of that moment. Thank you.
Just as a side note that gas power plants capture two types of energy, both the expansion of the burned gas and the heat. This is why they’re now more popular for new builds than oil.
We’re honestly almost past that at this point. Solar is devouring the world. Total global electricity production capacity is about 10 TW. China is currently producing 1 TW of panels annually. And the panels are still getting better and the prices are still dropping. We will quickly reach the point where the vast majority of global electricity production is solar, and everything else is a rounding error.
There just isn’t going to be any reason to build fusion plants. Maybe in the distant future colonies in the outer solar system and beyond will use them. But for anything inward of Mars, solar is the way to go. Solar+batteries is already, in 2026, the cheapest form of baseload power available. Material limitations are not a problem with modern battery chemistries. Daily swings in power demand will be solved by batteries. And we simply won’t have to worry about seasonal power swings. We’ll build enough solar panels to meet all our winter needs. We’ll build enough to power our cities during the coldest, cloudiest months. And then the rest of they year we’ll have super-abundant dirt cheap power.
The future is one of vast energy abundance. We’re going to find all sorts of ways to use energy that we’ve never even dreamed of before - mostly to take advantage of the abundance of dirt cheap energy we’ll have during all but the coldest months.
The days the steam engine are numbered. With the exception of remote polar outposts, everything’s going solar. It’s simply the cheapest most abundant form of energy we’ve ever discovered. Nothing can match it.
I still think nuclear (probably fission rather than fusion) has a place, at least in terms of materials and land usage. It’s just obscenely efficient in terms of energy per resource investment. Solar generation requires square miles of space and hundreds of tons of materials to match the output of a single reactor.
The US can provide for far more than its total electricity usage, with just the land area we currently use to grow corn for ethanol. You can put solar panels on parking lots, over roads, on train tracks, on rooftops, etc. You can even use the same land for both solar panels and growing certain crops. It’s called agrivoltaics. And that’s before you even get into panels in deserts, floating on water, etc.
There simply isn’t a shortage of land for solar. Unless you’re talking about tiny city-states, there just is no shortage of land needed for electric purposes. Land usage just isn’t a significant factor. Yes, land footprint is an advantage nuclear has, but it’s an advantage that really doesn’t matter much in the real world.
Huh, I didn’t realize the numbers worked out that well.
I think there’s still a raw-materials issue, though. Extraction and transport for that much solar is doable but still a big disadvantage.
You really need to watch this video. It explains it all. It’s long, but it’s incredibly well researched and presented.
Raw materials are not an issue.
There are a multitude of possible downsides with nuclear and with the greater number of reactors around the world comes the greater risk of something going catastrophically wrong for large amounts of people.
Solar has none of that downside, unless you include the sun devouring us in 6 billion years time…
The key difference on the materials is that you can use the materials endlessly with solar. With fossil fuels or even with fission, you have to constantly burn fuel. Sure, the actual fuel rods used in a reactor has a small volume. But those are made from enriched uranium, made from uranium oxide, made from uranium ore. The volume of waste generated is far larger than just the volume of the reactor core itself. But with solar? You only ever have to extract the materials once. Sure, the panels degrade over time. But after they degrade beyond usefulness, the material is still there. It’s like a lead-acid battery. They wear out after awhile, but they can be recycled. You eventually reach a point where you no longer have to mine any new materials to make new panels, or you only mine new materials as you want your electricity supply to grow. With any fuel-based power source, including fission, you have to keep extracting those fuels forever.
And don’t ignore the huge material requirement to build a reactor. You have to build a giant concrete dome around the damn things. Those domes are one of the few structures on Earth actually designed to survive a 9/11-style terrorist attack. They’re built to resist the impact of large jet aircraft. Plus the vast labyrinth of piping, heat exchangers, turbines, etc. All of this is of immense material cost. All-in, it wouldn’t surprise me at all if the mass of a GW of nuclear power plant is a lot more than the mass of a GW of solar plant. Nuclear power plants are hulking leviathans.
Solar doesn’t need to use that space exclusively. You can put solar on every roof, over every parking lot, and all grazing land. You can even put it over farmland in winter and tilt the panels out of the way during summer when there’s enough energy anyway. Or use semi-translucent panels over crops that don’t like blazing sunlight anyway.
We use more land for golf courses than photovoltaics.. I’m not trying to say that golf courses are bad (even though they’re not exactly environmental friendly) but it shows how little space photovoltaics actually need compared to other things.
Also, don’t underestimate the amount of material a nuclear reactor uses. A single cooling tower of the Phillipsburg NPP weighed 32,500 metric tons. That’s roughly 250-500 MW in solar panels, and then you haven’t even built the reactor or the generator. I found sources talking about half a million tons per nuclear plant.
I just hope the timeline you describe can outpace the timeline racing towards neo-feudalism, world war 3, global pandemics and heat waves triggering a new migration period.
The days the steam engine are numbered.
Not really. Unless there are some breakthroughs in technology that significantly lower capex & opex for grid scale energy storage, they’ll be sticking around for a long time.
There is an asterisk on the 1TW number, and that asterisk is capacity factor. In practice it means that depending on the time of year and location, the effective output of your solar panel will be between 0-40% of label capacity .
In my country for instance, you can expect 0-2% output from a panel in the winter time, which also happens to coincide with the peak demands (heating). Luckily, our politicians had some foresight in the 70s & 80s and built lots of hydro and nuclear power, which has been the backbone of our grid ever since (despite attempts to dismantle it).
you can expect 0-2% output from a panel in the winter time
I can confirm this. My family is off-grid and there have been extended periods the last two winters when it has simply been too dark for too long to depend on the solar without installing 50x more panels.
Also, the problem with having larger battery capacity to span these periods is that if they don’t get fully recharged or cycled properly the batteries get damaged and eventually die. We learnt that the hard way.
Solar is the undisputed champion for 80-90% of the year but needs to be complemented with something else for the remainder, if you want uninterrupted on-demand electricity.
My family is off-grid and there have been extended periods the last two winters when it has simply been too dark for too long to depend on the solar without installing 50x more panels
laughs in ultrahigh-voltage power lines connecting deserts to populated areas
Seriously, China is already implementing this technology, we just need a few socialist revolutions and we can go full solarpunk
What part did you miss about “off grid”?
Well, if you want energy access, don’t live in an off-grid house in a region of the planet without sunlight for 3 months a year
While I agree that this is all technological possible, I just have a sinking feeling capitalism will find a way to ruin this. Probably involving the profit incentives for power companies
Sometimes things just get horrifically cheap.
Could be pencils or shoes or lightbulbs or books a million one other things. Onetime they was rare and capitalism made them so common practically everyone into he world can have them.
The future is one of vast energy abundance
Wow. Isn’t it amazing that the majority of human history operated under renewable energy?
Turns out heat engines are like… pretty good at turning arbitrary energy sources into useful work! Who knew!
Its actually more like if a steam engine and a waterwheel had a baby, a turbine
Turns out there is a method of fusion power that doesn’t boil water. It generates massive electromagnetic fields that creates electricity.
direct energy conversion in a magnetic confinement setup, specifically leveraging a field-reversed configuration
Solar panels are all nice and stuft, but what about some boiled water?
Boil water? What am I, a chemist?
A cook?
Pasta bitches!!
Fun Fact: Since 2006-2007 Uruguay’s power infrastructure has mostly relied on green energy, making up over 90% of their power infrastructure, also making them fully self sustaining power wise
yeah some countries have that, like sweden and austria. the reason is because they’re very mountaineous areas, so there’s a lot of water power to harvest. in germany, which is really flat, that would have been impossible with water alone.
In Canada (2023), renewables make up 66% and nuclear 13% (about 80% together). That’s also pretty good.
fully self sustaining power wise
Damn, imagine that.
Talk about national security.
only 3.4 M people, little industry
I dont know about this topic spessifically, but the excuses of “but they are rich”/“they have a small population”/“they’re a small country” when used against good stuff like this not existing somewhere else almost always seems to be that… Dumb excuses.
Their education system is awesome? Oh well they’re only a handful of people.
They have low car usage and walkable/bikeable cities? Oh well their land is just 40,000 km².
They have good social services? Well they’re a really rich country.
china already have a supercritical carbon dioxide system integrated into a functioning powergrid and operating commercially. The system exploits an exotic phase of co2 which expands to fill a volume like gas, but moves frictionlessly through tubes as a liquid. There are concerns about lifespan because of how caustic the system is, but apparently some new materials are being trialled which negate this.
Heat pumps are the next evolution of the “it’s just steam again isn’t it?” meme.
They trying to make them with work with either memory alloys or with magnetic materials.
Same principle have something can go hot and cold based on some external control. But they will be done on solid materials not fluids.
Link with description for those who are unaware of this like me
This is mainly integrated AFAIK in industrial processes with high amounts of low entropy heat available (i.e. big volumes of not-that-hot liquids), and it allows for electric production from said heat with unprecedented efficiency. Cool shit
Harrumph
All that yet microwaves still leave my burrito frozen in the center.
Gotta lower the power setting and increase the cook time. One minute at 100%? No! One and a half minutes at 80%!
also, offset from the center of the microwave on the spinny plate. centered will only get you a portion of the waveform, moving the food around through a larger cross-section of the waveform = more thoroughly cooked stuff.
Still don’t understand how this could possibly generate energy.
the power plant is in space and beams energy to the dish.
Right, but like… whatever you’re doing in space is going to be more cost effective to do on earth. Not to mention the insane amount of energy lost to the atmosphere
Energy loss for wireless energy transmission is actually surprisingly low. Here is an example of 80% efficiency over 1 kilometer: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/1123672
Energy loss for wireless energy transition is actually surprisingly low.
…
Unless you really need to optimise for land use. An arbitrarily large solar array in space could transmit to a fairly small collector in the surface.
As for losing power to atmospheric attenuation, high frequency microwaves will pass right through most everything that would scatter visible light. Clouds, dust, etc wouldn’t really impede it.
I won’t say it’s not a silly idea, because it is. It’s fun to think about though.
You could also have a constellation of satellites with area greater than the surface of the earth. It’s not that silly of an idea.
Big solar panel
yeah but imagine you can put the plant and all the pollution on an asteroid or something.
musk wants datacenters in space. which makes sense, 24/7 sunlight and no transmission of power is grand; but I do wonder about the shielding and moving the data back and forth.
It’s nonsense, for cooling reasons alone
yeah had a whole convo with a neighbor about how much cooling tech the ISS depends on.
at least it won’t need separate water/ammonia loop setup like the ISS. radiators are pretty figured out. I just can’t see how they make it economical with all the launch and space logistics - and don’t get me wrong spacex can deliver to orbit - but can they make it profitable?
also, where’s the grunt for this supposed AI cloud gonna come from? what chips can survive for 1000s of hours of compute in that environment? and from what he’s said (24/7 sunlight) are they thinking lagrange points or what? also xmit/receive of massive amounts of data would need to be crucial to making it work and we got none of that infrastructure…
all leads me to think his ketamine is showing.
It basically doesn’t work out.
Theoretically you could have 2500 square meters of solar arrays above the weather beaming the power down to a dish with only a 500 square meter footprint.
But you’d still have to deal with weather with some kind of a storage solution. And 2500 square meters of area in space seems more expensive to claim than just 500 square meters of area on land, in pretty much any scenario.
Now we just need solar boilers.
To boil water.
Driving by the one in California was always a trip. You could see the lines of sunlight being reflected from the mirrors in the air; it was so bright.
turns out we sort of have that. only it does not boil water, but heats the air so liquid hydrocarbons come out of it https://www.research-collection.ethz.ch/server/api/core/bitstreams/186f37f3-be00-415e-8bbb-439b66ee2b75/content
I’m pretty sure we have actual solar water heaters too tbh
All it takes is a water pipe painted black zigzagging inside a box which is black inside and has the sun facing side replaced by glass.
You can get hot water from something like that even in Winter.
you can get>200F from a passive solar air heater made of soda cans on a 30F day.
https://www.instructables.com/Aluminum-Can-Solar-Heater/
we do. they are about the size of a solar panel, look similar and are on some roofs of houses in my area. the ones i’m refering to are not for boiling water, just for preheating so need less energy when it goes back into the [ger: heizungskreislauf]. all the ones i know are older then the current PV panel boom. fun fact, there are even concepts (and implentation, but i can’t find it) for vacuum glas tubes that have a parabolic mirror around a black painted copper pipe, which should be able to generate ~400 °C “process heat”. but they are not wide spread, cause PV is so much cheaper now
ACKSHUALLY we’re going to put special solar panels inside the reactor.
And then use the solar panels to power a water boiler.
D’oh!!!
Harness the power of the sun, but indoors!
It is artificial sun basically, so…
I think thats the plan right? Steam turbines i mean…
Yes, because electricity is just things spinning, and steam is the easiest way to make things spin.
People are essentially internal combustion engines that burn food. Trying to capture that energy in ways that increases the load on us just causes us to need more calories. That’s counter productive as you could just burn said food itself to get energy, and agriculture is an energy and environmentally intensive industry to begin with.
The original idea was the machines using humans as a connected neural network. I don’t think it would change much about the plot of the movies if they’re used for energy or brain power, so it’s easy to change it for your own head canon at least 🙂
As the other person already said, not totally relevant to the discussion at hand, but I do find that bit of trivia fascinating. The processing power version makes so much more sense logically, but it was put to the wayside by production executives because they thought the average movie-goer wouldn’t get it, since computing was still somewhat niche at the time.
We aren’t actually talking about the matrix here
On the other hand, clothes that would help me lose weight and charge my phone at the same time sound pretty cool. Just need to install Pokemon Go and I’ll be fit in no time.
Don’t worry, you’ll just eat more to compensate lol
so I get to enjoy more pizza?
Yes.
Can someone explain the solar panels bit at the bottom? Is it because the creator of the meme is advocating that as a cooler method of energy, given that it doesn’t use boiling water, or is it because the fusion reactor can utilise solar panels to convert the energy to electricity?
Because the Sun is a giant fusion reactor.
Oh okay. The reactor will still use steam boiling though
That’s the setup for the joke
Only maybe! DEC works similarly to how we collect energy in photovoltaics, and seems to be pretty promising
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Direct_energy_conversion?wprov=sfla1
My the actual intention of this joke, was to point out, that even if fusion will make again use of boiling water, we already have more “suffisticated” methods to generate electricity (like e.g. solar cells via the photovoltaic effect), that make not use of the great equalizer make wheel spin fast.
But based on many comments here (and yours is not one of them), this failed.
check out helion. they are trying to make small, modular reactors that are cheaper to build and maintain, so they can be deployed easier than fission reactors and the couple of fusion designs that already exist. iirc they have the actual fusion part working and are now working on actually getting the energy out of it. real engineering has some good videos about them on nebula and YouTube.
Super cool, thanks for the share. It will be interesting to see what sort of efficiency they get from the inductive energy transfer.
Hopefully they’re not just another Theranos.
Helion has had “a working power-producing system in five years!” since 2017.
sigh
I had to laugh at this one lol
I watched a docu about one fusion startup in the US. They’re skipping the boiling water step and converting the energy directly to electricity.
I dont remember the mechanics of how though. But they reportedly are the closest to net positive.
Helion energy. But i don’t think their approach has been verified yet. So take it with a grain of salt.
I didn’t know someone was trying a different approach like that, their animated graphics were really cool.
Eventually someone has gotta figure this out, I just hope I’m alive to see it and the outcome of it.
Can we then use that electricity to power a boiler?
They have been trying to do this for a long time I think and have gotten very close. At least that’s what I thought
I’m old, fusion has been close for decades. Some reactors achieve unity but can’t sustain, some can sustain the plasma but don’t quite produce a net energy production, and all of them are limited by selection of materials compatible with the sheer radiation of the chamber.
We’re frustratingly close, and progress has been made, but I get the feeling it’s one of those areas of science where a large breakthrough in either MHD theory or material science is needed to kick fusion from info NG research into practically possible.
Guess god wanted us to get malaria because he created mosquitos? /s
Mosquitos don’t automatically have malaria. The sun automatically has fusion.
Yes, Jimmy; you are.
