The nuclear batteries small enough for handheld devices that we’ve been reading about recently don’t use any water.
Those have been researched and tested for decades and the tech still hasn’t caught on. They just don’t put out enough power to be useful for much more than a clock circuit (not even enough to power a full watch, just keep the time).
I have serious doubts they’re going to suddenly become viable anytime soon.
Any useful energy production from nuclear is basically just making steam to run turbines. Same with coal but you know.
They just found rocks that are naturally hot and boiled water with it… Engineering is a scam.
Sometimes we take the hot rocks and ship them to other planets too.
We have rocks that do math, transmit electricity, and fly us through the sky.
When you get reductive about the natural sciences it all just boils down to applied physics which is applied mathematics.
But engineering and technology? Applied geology.
(/s because I’m not going to acknowledge that geology is applied chemistry and so on)
In a sense, you’re right. And there’s a bit of magic involved. If you cut a certain special rock into slices, engrave runes on one side of it, and inject lightning, the rock starts to think. I don’t see how you can describe that as anything other than magic.
You have to engrave special runes on these rocks for them to work.
I heard that some wizards on the remote island of Tayouan far east are very good at it.
Reminds me of https://xkcd.com/435/
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.”
[Encased mentioned] I love that game
The issue is that boiling water is inside human bodies
Nuclear power is just steampunk with magic rocks.
still waiting for those molten fuel MHD reactors
Nuclearpower is just boiling waterHydro?
Nuclearpower is justboilingwaterSolar?
It can be done with boiling water, but it’s not very efficient.
Nuclearpoweris just boiling water
I bet there is a way more efficient way to harness it that we are just missing too lol
“what if fire… But… MOAR”
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…
The only truly new method of power generation we’ve made in the last 100 years has been photovoltaic cells. Everything else is just finding new ways to make turbines spin.
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
Like Dr. Pepper?
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
- Carbon monoxide
It seems you need to learn more about prions.
- Predators with cloaking devices
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.
At paper mills the fear is caustic pools filled with bases.
Molten salt?
We can then use compressed CO2 in the place of steam to drive the turbine.
And then there is thermonuclear generators
plus a side of extra spicy landfill
That’s from building nuclear weapons though, not power
Or melting salt, or whatever. But yes it’s just making stuff hot.
And then using that salt to heat water into steam and using that steam to turn a turbine
actually space based nuclear uses thermoelectricNearly 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.
There are gas turbine generators that directly use shaft power to generate electricity
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.
Piezo electricity too
Oh yea! I forgot about that one! It’s starting to be used a lot in implantable medical devices to generate a small current. There was also that thing a few years back that was trying to use it to generate power from waves/tides; not sure if that actually got past the proof-of-concept stage though.
Yeah, who would have guessed that modernity was invented by someone who stuck magnets to a fidget spinner and strapped it to a boiler.
Wind? And binary cycle geothermal plants but not sure how common they are.
Wind turbines also.
But some solar does focus it on a tower to make steam to drive a turbine.
There are some fusion designs that use direct energy conversion.
Some work went into fission designs as well.
