Gotta go fast
(midwest.social)
fossilesque
Science MemesTurbine go brr
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?
Are we against boiling water only because it is old? Because if that is the only problem and we are ok with reliability and efficiency than i will take old
Its more a commentary that most "new electricity source!!! Amazing!" Is a heat source thats boiling water to turbines which isnt a new method, its a new source of heat. So more a complaint about sensational headlines about electricity
Hopefully this one directly shoves the electons. I'm scared of society's DHMO dependency.
I mean, is there a more efficient way to take raw energy and spin a turbine with it?
Photosynthesis?
Sahara?
Don't we try this every few decades and realize it's not as great as it seems? There's one of these in the American Southwest that wasn't worth the trouble to operate.
In terms of badass things to build your civilisation around, though, every single bit of me wants to live in a city constructed around one of these bad boys.
Hell yeah I'll get in a parade to worship one of those things, they're insanely fucking cool.
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
Supercritical CO2 is entering the chat
https://cleantechnica.com/2026/01/01/china-built-a-supercritical-co%E2%82%82-generator-that-doesnt-mean-it-will-last/
Compressed air.....turbines still going burr this whole time! Gravity pumping... Turbines!
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.
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.
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.
Water is a fucking insanely awesome material.
I think this may be due to the specific heat of water, no other substance matches it.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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
Photovoltaics
Guess what I'm boiling with the power from that solar panel
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.
😭
Good news!
https://youtu.be/BNDrC6fkjf0
Meh, it works.
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?
https://youtu.be/HSvguJ7u3VM
I knew what video it was before I clicked, love that guy XD
MA! NEW ACE COMBAT BOSS JUST DROPPED!!
Was gonna say. I definitely blew this thing up in AC4.
latin chanting intensifies
It would also be ideal for high-efficiency, high-temperature hydrogen production.
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
Well there hydro power, where we just skip the boiling part and have water turn turbines.
What about tidal?
terrible platform
sometimes birds turn turbines, what when they fall down with the water. also fish i guess, but i got a vendetta against the birds.
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.
And to be fair, those none steam sources, i.e. hydro, wind and solar are all just solar basically.
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
Always has been.
Yeah but, really all these are just turbinepunk because in the end we're pushing the turbine either by using steam or natural wind.
Supercritical CO2 turbine be like: whatup
This is the revelation my mustache has been waiting for.
Hey man I just want warm noodles
How else are you going to make your tea?
soak newspaper in a damp mug like all statesians
fun fact, u can also boil opposed spy satelites with that setup
I doubt it, calibrating a focal point to a stationary, relatively nearby target, say a hundred metres or so, is fairly simple, but to apply that to a satellite, a moving target (with a changing velocity if we are talking about a satellite in an eccentric or molnya orbit) either in high or low earth orbit, that's a distance of between 200-20,000kms.
Even a satellite in perfectly circular orbit is constantly changing its distance relative to a point on the ground, meaning you have to constantly adjust the focal point of the mirrors. At 250km, your field of mirrors (say, a 100m circle of them) would describe about 0.023 degrees of curvature, almost completely flat.
And that's before accounting for atmospheric attenuation and scattering of the light.
On a clear night with many gw of laser energy, maybe you could peel the skin off a low orbit satellite, but even that would be impractical.
Can you elaborate?
The mirrors used in these kind of installations are typically rotated to track the sun. Idk if it could take down a satellite but I would imagine they could set nearby things on fire by adjusting mirror angles.
Atmospheric scattering would make that effectively impossible, even if you could rotate the mirrors quickly enough. The light rays would be too unfocussed to properly heat up anything in orbit
Idk if it could take down a satellite
I know you don't know.
I do.
And no it cannot, that's only in fallout New Vegas. This is not possible to weaponize because: physics.
I have a theoretical degree in physics
Welcome aboard!
it better be a degree celsius
It's in kelvin
Not a degree then.
Absolutely
TIL
The home alone guy?
Oh neat like the ones outside Vegas, I always wonder if birds fly into the center
Well they certainly don’t fly out of it
The ones with cameras might, probably a big conspiracy
Moths must love this shit
For like..... 0.002 seconds it's gotta feel real great
At night?
The sodium probably gets hot enough to keep glowing overnight
Curious how well it works with moon reflection
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/
Technically still solar power, but with the moon as an additional mirror in the system.
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.
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.
Free roast pidgeon for the workers
Yeah, but that secretly a lazer weapon.
The movie Sahara did it.
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.
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.
Wot if instead of boiling water, we boiled CO2, and instead of boiling CO2, we kept it at high pressure so that it never quite reached boiling or condensation?
Using water is cheaper and easier. That is all that stop your idea from being IRL.
For now
well the Chinese already use co2 turbines irl so idk what you're going on about
"The only downside of your idea is that it is terrible."
This kills the crab
geothermal typically uses chemicals other than water because they have a lower boiling point
the specific chemical being cheap is relatively unimportant if it’s a closed loop. the cost is next to nothing compared to the whole construction
different tool for a different purpose. water has a large heat of evaporation which is something that allows for more compact turbines
sCO2 turbines are like 1/30th the size of an equivalent steam turbine.
Boiled water gang
Hot hydro homies in your area
