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."
this post was submitted on 14 Nov 2024
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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)||
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.
~~Nuclear~~ power is just boiling water
Hydro?
~~Nuclear~~ power is just ~~boiling~~ water
Solar?
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.
- Solar panels: Direct sky-spiciness to electricity conversion
- Wind: Sky-spiciness made the air move
- Hydroelectric: Sky-spiciness lifted the water up, gravity brings it down
- Fossil fuels: Really old stored sky-spiciness from ancient plants
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.
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.
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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.
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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.
Wind turbines also.
But some solar does focus it on a tower to make steam to drive a turbine.
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One could even argue that hydro power is just boiling water, letting it condense, and then letting it spin a turbine
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