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)||
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.
Molten salt?
We can then use compressed CO2 in the place of steam to drive the turbine.
Nuclearpower is just boiling waterstill waiting for those molten fuel MHD reactors
“what if fire… But… MOAR”
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.
Seems to be just photovoltaics and spinny things.
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.
The best solar panels are getting at or above the efficiency of converting nuclear heat to electricity (about 1/3) so they probably shouldn’t get that poor efficiency label.
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.
Mechanical engineers fist pumping after finding out their entire profession is not yet obsolete
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.
Yes. Water + spicy rocks. Everything else is solar power, which is also nuclear power, but with the spiciness in the sky instead.
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?
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.
No! I vanted orange!
The same guy who deliberately messed with the vending machine will also intentionally misplace the delivery of the skull gun aug module, smh.
Taste: slightly metallic, not great, not terrible.
A plausible Nile Red quote.
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.
NICO is your friend https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/NICO_Clean_Tobacco_Card
Adding more radiation to tobacco. Sure.
But slightly serious here. The actual mechanism of about 75% of tobacco related cancer, is the fact that tobacco leaves bioaccumulate natural radioactive elements from the soil.
If you smoke, you have radioactive lead and polonium in your lungs.
That’s not a spicy challenge id be willing to try.
And then there are thermonuclear generators
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.
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.
Wind turbines also.
But some solar does focus it on a tower to make steam to drive a turbine.
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Piezo electricity too. It’s very seldom used for power generation but does exist
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.
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plus a side of extra spicy landfill
That’s from building nuclear weapons though, not power
There are some fusion designs that use direct energy conversion.
Some work went into fission designs as well.
actually space based nuclear uses thermoelectricNuclear power is the refining distilling and enriching of uranium into unstable isotopes and higher elements, boiling water is one small step in converting nuclear energy into electrical energy.
But it’s one of the most important steps because it’s where the actual electricity comes from.
into unstable isotopes
No, they were there all along.
Sheng Wang is hilarious! Seriously, if you like comedy then watch his stuff
Both Jimmy O. Yang and Sheng Wang are hilarious, but you should recognize that they are two different people.
The only Asian standup comedian guy with long hair I know of is Sheng Wang, so i thought the pic was him when he was young. My bad
Sheng Wang had short hair when he first got into the standup game:
God damnit Jinyang!
“This is you as an old man. I’m ugly and dead alone.”
Errich, is the refrigerator running? This is Mike Hunt, and he’s a rich.
Eric Bachman, this is your mother. You are not my son.
I heard that somewhere in the US there were parts of a nuclear power plant being delivered by steam train. So that’s basically one steam engine supplying another! (^^,)
I can’t seem to find an article about it anywhere, so it might be an urban legend :(
Given that the first commercial nuclear power plants in the US were coming online in the late 1950s, that’s entirely possible. Steam trains were well on their way out by then, but there were still a few hauling freight around.
Fun adjacent fact: even when the British Empire had moved off of wind sails and into coal, those coal ships didn’t have the range to possibly cover the entire Empire. Coal stations were setup around the world, and the coal had to be transported by sail. The previous technology helps get the next generation technology going.
Sail ships continued to be used well into the 20th century. The absolute last purely sail powered warship served during WW1!
Big Steam is playing us for suckers!
They’re just spinning us in circles!
