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.

Molten salt?

We can then use compressed CO2 in the place of steam to drive the turbine.

Like Dr. Pepper?

What about hydro electric? It uses cold steam

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

• 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.

I mean, radioactive isotopes are formed in supernovae, so it's really just solar power from a different sun, right?

Taste: slightly metallic, not great, not terrible.

Cherenkov: The blue raspberry of nuclear radiation

Hydro is just more dense steam, wind is less dense steam, it's steam engines all the way!

There's also fuel cells, where fuel is not burned to create steam to move something, but combined with oxygen in a different way (the end products still being the same) so the electrons shuttled around during this reaction can be utilised as electricity. Think of combustion as oxidation of your fuel, the oxidation meaning that you (among other things) move electrons from the fuel to oxygen. In combustion, unfortunately you can't access the electrons directly, as they are always stuck in the chemical bonds of the molecules, that's why we take the detour via heat/mechanical - the steam engine. The fuel cell now separates fuel and oxygen, and thus divides the combustion reaction into two parts that happen at opposite sides of the cell. Those sides are divided by a membrane that does not allow the electrons to transfer across, so they need to take a detour through an electric circuit, in which we can harvest them as electrical power.

I always found it really fascinating that fuel cells are the only other technology than solar where the electrons we use as electrical power are more or less directly generated as opposed to the detour via a generator. Unfortunately, fuel cells are still a very niche technique.

~~Nuclear~~ power is just ~~boiling~~ water

I'm kinda surprised that nobody has harnessed our magnetic field to build a power source. Or at least tried. I have no idea how it could work, and I may be dumb as shit for this. But I feel like it could be possible if we had another 500 years left of society.