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boiling water again (quokk.au)

submitted 5 hours ago by Deceptichum@quokk.au to c/science_memes@mander.xyz

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[-] j4yc33@piefed.social 9 points 53 minutes ago

[-] fushuan@lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 points 3 minutes ago

We never left steam engines really.

[-] FuglyDuck@lemmy.world 9 points 1 hour ago

i mean, they can run the plasma through some magnetic fields...

But it's less efficient that boiling water.

[-] Collatz_problem@hexbear.net 15 points 3 hours ago

We live in a steampunk timeline, everything must boil water.

[-] Petter1@discuss.tchncs.de 9 points 3 hours ago

It melts salt, isn’t it?

[-] kuberoot@discuss.tchncs.de 17 points 2 hours ago

If you mean molten salt reactors, guess what they do with the molten salt to make electricity...

[-] ByteJunk@lemmy.world 6 points 2 hours ago

...they found a clever way to induce a current using temperature differentials between the molten salt and some sort of coolant mass?

[-] toofpic@lemmy.world 2 points 29 minutes ago

Oh I love this comment. Such a not-leading question!

[-] funkless_eck@sh.itjust.works 2 points 1 hour ago

and that coolant mass' name?

[-] Petter1@discuss.tchncs.de 2 points 2 hours ago

🤭🤫yess

[-] ekZepp@lemmy.world 3 points 2 hours ago

💨Efficency💨🔁

[-] psoul@lemmy.world 6 points 2 hours ago

If they make an artificial sun inside a donut why don’t they line the donut with solar panels? Are they stupid?

[-] ByteJunk@lemmy.world 10 points 2 hours ago* (last edited 2 hours ago)

But you'd have to allow the sun to leak out of the donut, and I'm not too sure that sun-leaking donuts are OSHA approved.

[-] Warl0k3@lemmy.world 21 points 4 hours ago* (last edited 4 hours ago)

There's also Direct Energy Conversion, Radiophotovoltaics and Radioisotope Thermoelectric Generators, but none of those are practical for large scales (and only DEC works with fusion, hypothetically)

[-] pulsewidth@lemmy.world 16 points 4 hours ago

Make alternator spin. Is only way.

[-] ByteJunk@lemmy.world 6 points 2 hours ago

I refuse to believe this.

You're telling me that Humanity is able to understand what goes on at the heart of stars, and is on the brink of being able to harness that power ("Soon TM"), and the best we can come up with is a big tea kettle? I'm not buying it.

There's got to be a better way of capturing all that energy - like, solar panels but for other types of radiation? Or if that's not possible because wavelengths or something , maybe make something glow and use normal panels? Or like, can't we take a particle accelerator and flip it around and pull energy from the particles that go zooming?

I'm sure there's a reason why all of that is hard, but surely not impossible?

[-] Cypher@aussie.zone 7 points 2 hours ago

The majority of the energy released will be heat, relatively few high energy photons are released so ‘solar’ isn’t a viable option and your suggestion about a particle accelerator just doesn’t make any sense.

Boiling water is literally the best way to capture the energy released.

[-] realitista@lemmus.org 7 points 4 hours ago

Finally a challenger has emerged

[-] verstra@programming.dev 4 points 3 hours ago

Let's separate CO2 from atmosphere and use it to run such generators. Win win. But don't ask physics about this top much

[-] verstra@programming.dev 4 points 3 hours ago

Actually, I remember that on iceland they were injecting CO2 into rock, and it was shipped to them from ... Swicerland, I think, in shipping tanks. It was captured from concrete manufacturing plants, which apparently produce a ton if it. So there you go - cheap CO2 is not a problem

[-] realitista@lemmus.org 2 points 3 hours ago* (last edited 3 hours ago)

I doubt the amount used in what I presume is a closed system like this will be significant on a atmosphere level, but it could certainly be the source. If nothing else would make a great headline.