ACTUALLY ITS BOILING SODIUM!!… ~which then gets used to boil water~
I love that deep down, coal, gas, nuclear, this thing… all done to heat water, make steam, use steam to turn turbines…. We are just in a steampunk universe
Always has been.
Solar panel projects, which many have outstripped this and other projects in power limitations, do not boil water to generate electricity.
And wind turbines, and hydroelectric plants.
But all but solar cells are pretty much turbines all the way down
Hydroelectric power stations still rely on steam, it’s just in another part of the cycle.
What? Hydroelectric power stations use gravity and the falling or flowing water makes the turbines turn. No steam.
Thermal plants (nuclear, coal, gas), including solar thermal plants, use steam.
He means water vapour, ie the rain cycle.
That’s not steam, though.
Would not like to be the technician working on the hydrostation where part of the rain cycle is steam
Ooooooooh.
They use steam condensed in a pressurized environment
And to be fair, those none steam sources, i.e. hydro, wind and solar are all just solar basically.
Well there hydro power, where we just skip the boiling part and have water turn turbines.
What about tidal?
terrible platform
Underwater turbines.
sometimes birds turn turbines, what when they fall down with the water. also fish i guess, but i got a vendetta against the birds.
Are you suggesting we should boil them first?
dude i lost track are we talking about billionaires again
Yeah but, really all these are just turbinepunk because in the end we’re pushing the turbine either by using steam or natural wind.
Hey man I just want warm noodles
This is the revelation my mustache has been waiting for.
Oh neat like the ones outside Vegas, I always wonder if birds fly into the center
Moths must love this shit
For like… 0.002 seconds it’s gotta feel real great
At night?
Curious how well it works with moon reflection
Technically still solar power, but with the moon as an additional mirror in the system.
A construction like this could never work with moonlight, not even theoretically. There is a nice xkcd about it: https://what-if.xkcd.com/145/
The sodium probably gets hot enough to keep glowing overnight
Sadly the ones outside Vegas are about to shut down because they are not profitable https://live-ier.pantheonsite.io/big-green/california-shuts-down-its-solar-thermal-plant-13-years-early/
I love how fucking biased that article is. It mentions Obama like 10 times, including this gem:
Clearly, the Obama administration decided to spend taxpayer funds on a technology that was poorly conceived and quickly outdated.
Thanks for the hindsight, moron writer guy. So what’s trump doing, investing in better renewables?
No, instead of building an underperforming power plant, he spent the same money just to prevent a power plant from being built.
Money for nothing and the chicks for free amirite.
I thought it was chips for free until my late twenties.
When I was 7-8 (when the song was popular) I thought it was checks (cheques) for free. So I thought it wand money and checks (also money to a 7 y/o back when people paid with them at grocery stores still).
Didn’t realize it was chicks until the 90s when I became interested in chicks.
Free roast pidgeon for the workers
Yeah, they do, and get incinerated, unfortunately. A few every day, actually. Which is one of the reasons those never took off. Besides big upfront costs for the tower generator, there are additional costs for maintaining the generator with moving parts, and then for scraping the dead birds off the mirrors to top it off. All just to save a few pennies on mirrors instead of just chucking a bunch of solar panels into a field and mostly forgetting about them.
big advantage is that molten salt allows for energy storage for nighttime
But then you also have to re-heat it in the morning with combustibles to kickstart the generation again.
Yeah, but that secretly a lazer weapon.
I have a theoretical degree in physics
it better be a degree celsius
It’s in kelvin
The home alone guy?
Not a degree then.
TIL
Welcome aboard!
You activated ARCHIMEDES?! What the hell are you thinking?!
Never sell proven chemistry or physics short. Water transforming to a vapor is awesome. Maybe we could harness the energy of water transforming to a solid too.
The thing is: transforming into a solid is usually caused by removing energy from matter. The real reason steam is so great is because we put energy into it to make it steam and when the steam turns a turbine, we are converting that chaotic energy into directional, controlled energy.
I mean, it… does expand when freezing… so maybe?
I knew what video it was before I clicked, love that guy XD
It’s so crazy that we’ve found like six different ways to use rocks to boil water. You’d think there’d just be two or three
It’s going to be boiling water again… Isn’t it?
Must be the water
I’m gonna need help identifying all of them. So far I have burn them, smush glowing ones together, and reflect radiation with them.
- Coal. Set it on fire, use fire to boil water
- Geothermal. Go down where the rocks are hot, use hot rocks to boil water.
- Nuclear. Magic rocks get hot all by themselves. Use them to boil water.
- Photovoltaics. Shape rocks into solar panels, use solar panels to power stove to boil water.
- Concentrated solar. Use mirrors to reflect sunlight onto salt (a rock). Boil water with hot salt.
- Put water in a glass tube. Use mercury (which comes from a rock) to draw a vacuum. Water boils at room temp under a vacuum.
- Lob a space rock at the planet. Space rock vaporizes everything in a 100 mile radius, including water.
I’m sure we can think of more
Dam. Stack rocks to block water, use leaking water to turn propeller.
Ohhh right that makes sense. I was only thinking of ways to use rocks to boil water to make electricity. So I missed geothermal and disregarded photovoltaics.
It’s incredibly silly that even tho we advance the scale of power, with electricity, solar and even nuclear, all we use it is to boil water. We just can’t seem to be able t build any a more advanced mechanism, it seems.
Photovoltaics
Instasaved!
Actually if you look inside the cells it’s just a tiny little pocket of boiling water
That’s actually what they dope the silicon with, one really angry water molecule.
(it’s not btw, this is satire)
😭
Guess what I’m boiling with the power from that solar panel
Hard to beat spinning a magnet to generate electricity, and it’s hard to beat boiling water to spin a magnet
Fair point magnets are basically a superpower by themselves.
So is water. Hard to beat a miracle fluid that covers most of our planet.
“Worldbuilders hate this trick! Cover most of your world in water so you have less stuff to figure out names for.”
I think this may be due to the specific heat of water, no other substance matches it.
Fair point it’s been so long since I last took a chemistry course that if I knew anything cool and hidden about water, I’d have trouble resurfacing it. I do know they call it “dihydrogen monoxide” in some reports tho.
Really? I thought that was just a “sticker on the waterbottle joke”
It should be, if even that, but as usual there’s people who take jokes far too far. Like, I’m sure there’s a Church of Flath-Earthism recognized somewhere. In the US. Southern US.
Wind and photovoltaic have nothing to do with water
Mfw they use wind and photovoltaic energy to pump water to a high place so they can put it through a turbine later
I’d guess because its all heat energy in the end, so you need something that expands and compresses. The only alternative I suppose would be like sound waves, or mechanical energy, or whatever a battery does.
That does make sense, but then again, it’s been 2000 years and we can’t find something that boils, expands and compresses better than water? Or is t just because water is commonplace enough in comparisoan?
I am sure that they have, but there’s a lot more to it than just that. They have to consider long term maintenance, safety, and availability of parts.
Water is known and well established, you can buy a lot of stuff right off the shelf and we know it’s short and long term dangers. Everything else gets expensive and unknown very quickly.
Somebody linked above to a new closed loop turbine design which uses supercritical CO2. I know from CO2 refrigeration that CO2 has some insane volumetric expansion based on temp which makes it a good candidate for use in a closed loop turbine system. Plus, because they’re running it through the turbine as a supercritical fluid, the density is higher than that of steam so it requires smaller turbines. The biggest issue is that because it’s super critical CO2 youre talking about working pressures well over 1000PSI. That doesn’t make it impossible to work with as we already know from CO2 refrigeration, but it does make it a bit more difficult than just boiling water.
Friggin’ CO₂ always causing issues.
I always assume they had additives in closed loop systems, but you’re right you’d think there would be something.
Started looking into what liquids they are using and realized i was reading treatment chemicals they add to the boiler water. I know there’s some reactors that use molten salt, but they are just used as energy transfer to… the boiler full of water. Lol. The properties of water expansion from liquid to steam probably can’t be beat or it’s qualities of cheap, simple, good enough.
I learned the other day there is a nuclear reactor in development that will use as primary coolant…molten lead.
Still use to boil water then, but pretty freaky still.
Good news!
Kickstart this new source of clean energy by burning fossil fuels and spraying CFCs into the air. A hotter planet means water boils easier! 😃
The efficiency of any heat engine comes from the difference between hot and cold, you can’t get useful work if the water’s already boiled.
Unless you’re talking about when water converts to steam, in which case it expands by over a thousand times its original size, and the expansion is what provides usable energy and not the temperature differentials.
It turns out boiling water is a really good idea.
Especially when you make a good cuppa with it.
There are a lot of options, but water works, is cheap as hell, and spills aren’t much of an issue.
Nestle & Dupont show up in this hell and Frank Herbert Daemons out their shit discard for dope that 5-MEO-DMT was only alluding to.
USSR also built an experimental power plant of this type. Sadly, it was closed and disassembled after the breakup of the Soviet Union.
They’re pretty neat. Since the molten salt core stays hot for a while after the sun goes down, in some high-output high-storage setups they’re cheaper than traditional PV panels + batteries while providing the same power.
It’s just used to scroll social media again isn’t it?
Porn.
It’s technically illegal in China, but I don’t know how illegal.
not illegal enough to stop it from being posted all over 小红书 that’s for damn sure.
I’m not complaining, it’s great.
Physicists just looove a hot shower
That’s the reason why all electricity generation boils down to hot water.
Well molten salt batteries are a thing, I’m presuming this is to buffer the output of the solar and that the losses were deemed acceptable given the renewable nature of this.
Yeah, you can store the molten salt and its heat for when it’s needed even at night. But it is used to drive a turbine hehe
How else are you going to make your tea?
soak newspaper in a damp mug like all statesians
