Except solar. And wind. And hydro.

We’re living in a steampunk world after all

Readily available, low boiling point, non corrosive (relatively), and ecologically safe. What more do you want?

Hydro isn't. Nor is solar photo voltaic, wind, or tidal, but yeah, nearly everything else is. In a combined-cycle natural gas or diesel plant half of the power generated isn't steam power, but the other half is.

I watched a video a while ago about a new approach to fusion which uses induction iirc https://youtu.be/uRaQLZaaHWo

Which one? My first impression is that ignoring all the energy in neutrons should be pretty inefficient

Maybe it's based on this: https://en.wikipedia.org/...

There's a great video by Improbable Matter on YouTube breaking down the issues with helion , well worth a watch https://youtube.com/watch?v=3vUPhsFoniw

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m_CFCyc2Shs I don't listen to Lex much these days, but that was a fun discussion.

That's silly.
Clouds would knock the pipes down.

How long is that gonna take? A few decades?

-Sam Altman, when he hears about this

Because it would cool down on the way back.

Oh yeah! I did that for my house. We have free heat and power. It's a bit of a pain in the ass to build the pipeline that far out and it took me many more hours than expected, but, the system toots along just fine.

What a stupid suggestion...

Let's instead move the earth closer to the sun and boil the oceans directly.......

I'm curious if it would even be thermodynamically possible. If we could magically run a pipe that far, would the heat from the water radiate into space before it reached earth to do anything useful?

Someone get XKCD to do a video short on this.

building a pipe all the way to space would mean the pipe would have to sustain its own weight, which is the same problem as a space elevator. that doesn't work either because there's no material on earth strong enough to support its own weight over that distance.

Derail Valley Simulator won't let you drive that exact steam engine, but it simulates Diesel, Steam, and an Electric engine quite satisfactorily. To the point that I can't use the steam engines without blowing them up accidentally.

Did you mean to say a nuclear reactor being delivered by steam engine?
It's a great photo though, kinda nuts how fast things moved then. It also reminds me of that story of a Chinese train driver standing next to the train he drives a few decades apart, from steam to high speed rail.

"It's a blockchain of an highly enhanced hydrogen process. Thanks to its AI quantum mechanism it manages to increase the energy output by a ton through its cloud."

Just tell that to investors and they'll gobble it up. /s

I wonder how fast we could get a steam train to go if we stuck a suitably shaped non-critical amount of plutonium in the firebox.

Also the water is just a medium for energy transfer; it can be reused & recycled in near perpetuity in a closed system.

We're used to open systems with water in power stations, including cooling towers etc, because water is abundant on earth so it's cheaper to just dump it back into the atmosphere; we probably take the whole thing for granted.

But it could be engineered to be a closed system a bit like a coolant in a refrigeration unit cycling back and forth. And it probably will need to be a closed system in the future in space where water will be incredibly precious.

The same principal has been tried with crypto mining to reduce waste / cost.

Capture the heat and use it elsewhere like to heat the building.

Downside for heating buildings though is unless you're doing it somewhere where it's always cold, you eventually still end up with heat you can't use, and at that scale, there's better heating choices. I heard the city of vancouver was looking into heating a swimming pool with it, at least that would have a constant use.

Then you still end up with the issue of the mining cards only being good for 2-3 years before the tech improves and they aren't mining efficiently anymore, which then just leads to more e-waste.

But imagine if the cards themselves had a really long useful life or were super cheap and easily recyclable, we could put miners in things like space / baseboard heaters which were already going to be doing resistive heating and then gain something from that instead of just heat.

Imagine doing something like having a GPU based baseboard heater that folds proteins whenever it's on, where it doesn't become completely obsolete in a couple years. If the chips were cheap enough it'd be way better than just doing heat.

Edit: Taking the idea further... imagine if governments mandated reuse of the heat generated by data centers instead of piping it outside? You want to build a data center here? Build a public pool and heat the building / water with your excess heat. Then that commercial zone also gets a fitness center for anyone nearby.

A good example of how you can do amazing things with steam is looking at the very last of the steam locomotives. Before they switched to diesel or electric, the steam locomotives were engineering masterpieces. Yes, you still got the classic steam locomotive puffs of steam coming out of the locomotive, but they only let the steam go once they had extracted the maximum possible energy from it.

Here's a good video going over the whole design.

Municipal steam networks are still operating today.

For new infrastructure, Electricity is just so good-enough, that it is hard to justify building out partial alternatives like steam pipes. But where we already have them, they are still useful.

All large cities in Finland are heated by combined heat and power (CHP) power plants.

These power plants first make super heated steam (like 800°C, 1500°F), runs that through turbine to make electricity, then send the cooled down water (80-150°C, 170°F-300°F) to all homes through district heating grid.

From that water the home is heated and hot water is used.

Now that we have the district heating network, when electricity is cheap, we can also use electricity to boil the water and send it through the grid. Water is also easy to use as storage, if the need of consumption requires buffering.

Smaller cities use just heat plants, were there is no turbine for electricity generation, just the heating of water to district heating grid.

Most plants use biomass as power source in the power plants, historically they were coal, but it has been now almost completely phased out.

Steam had several technical and power limitations. It was dropped very quickly when electrification was an option.

Well, hydro is just spinning water again, wind is spinning air. Solar is stealing electrons from the sun (i think?) So that's cool

You can transfer gas to electricity without boiling water. But it is much more efficient to combine it with boiling water

Cyberpunk-lite 😔

We need this on lemmy

Throwing water into a star wouldn't get you steam, it'd just fuel the star XD

Nah. You'll probably want several shells operating above any sane temperature for steam. You don't want to lose that extremely high temperature by just heating water to 600 °C or so.

Most modern means of electricity production involve creating heat in some way, then using that heat to boil water, creating steam. That steam is then used to turn a turbine, which generates electricity.

https://en.wikipedia.org/...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betavoltaic_device

We use steam because it is very efficient and lowest cost to maintain.

Yeah but photovoltaic has a yield of less than 50% even for the best panels. Lots of waste there, compared to steam.

Isn’t that dangerous? No-one really knows what magnets are.

Salt is absolutely terrible for any equipment involved in power generation. You're better off with a power plant and a separate desalination plant than trying to use one for both

But you're right, cheap energy will help immensely with this

In other words, boil water yet again?

Because it's not as cool as directly harvest the energy itself like in scifi.

It's not really a problem, it's just funny that so many forms of power generation we have are just boiling water to make steam that spins turbines.

Now here’s an idea - we boil the water to turn turbines, and then have the steam collect and pool in an upper chamber before running through another turbine into the first boiling chamber below?

While tragic, those losses were necessary sacrifices for the continued success of the dihydrogen monoxide industry.

Let’s gloss over how the average human being now consists of 60% dihydrogen monoxide, though.

Everybody who has been exposed to dihydrogen monoxide is expected to die at some point.

It's in schools, hospitals, and even beer.

As if CO2 wasn't bad enough already? Now I have to deal with it making snarky comments about what I wore to work today?

Yeah; somehow converting the plasma directly into electricity at a 1:1 ratio using... Uh... Dilithium or something.

Not a better plan but just a curiosity as a physicist enthusiast.

Regarding nuclear fission and nuclear waste (and ignoring the big elephant in the room that are nuclear weapons)....

What are the technical difficulties to turn the radiation emitted by nuclear waste into electricity?

I mean, if the nuclear waste is still radiating, it has stored energy that is radiated as photons, right?

Then, we have the photo-electric effect which turns photons into moving electrons as long as the frequency surpasses a minimum threshold.

Given that the radiation of nuclear waste has frequency way higher than UV, why can't it be used to feed a photoelectric generator?

Also, we have tons of nuclear waste, so the argument that a single rod doesn't generate enough radiation seems kinda bogus since we could just store the nuclear waste into a safer recipient that turns the harmful rays directly into electricity and we have a shit-ton of them stored in thick lead or concrete barrels just so this radiation don't harm the surroundings.

.

It is a genuine question that I had, but never had enough physics class to understand where this logic falls apart.

Because, if it were feasible and "cheap", I bet that the US would already be doing it and having access to "free energy" (not really, but a long-standing generator that doubles as removing nuclear waste from the ambient).

Just get Maxwell’s demon to separate the plasma into positive and negative charges, effectively creating a capacitor, then discharge it directly over some HVDC lines!

I would swear I saw Tom Scott interview one lab that was planning on building a fusion generator that worked like a diesel engine. Like, the fusion reaction drives a piston.

There is a hydrogen fusion reaction that releases beta particles, i.e., electrons. This could be used to produce electricity directly without boiling water, but I think the heat output would be such that you could also boil water for more electricity.

In addition, with our current grid (and many of the things that run on it), frequency is incredibly important. Having giant, heavy, spinny things with lots of inertia does wonders for naturally maintaining a very constant grid frequency as loads fluctuate.

rankine cycle

in this economy?

That depends on how you define "viable". And "generate".

Peltier devices generate a voltage from a heat differential passing through a bi-metalic matrix. It's not a huge voltage, so the definition of "viable" comes in there, but it can be used to power low power things and works well for heater accessories. I first saw its use for wood stove fans that get powered just by sitting on the stove. I've also seen them power USB chargers for pellet stoves.

And then there's batteries that generate a voltage from submerging two types of metal in acid. And more modern battery designs might be doing it a bit differently but still no spinning magnets and coils. Obviously they are viable for powering many things, but usually themselves are powered from another source rather than using fresh acid for each charge, so the "generate" bit comes into question.

I think there's some others. Like fiction can be used to generate a static voltage and I'm pretty sure I've seen some tesla coils that use friction to generate their voltage. If you continuously generate that voltage, you could make a circuit out of it rather than shock high school kids or make their hair stand up, though I don't know what kind of amperage you could generate like that (that 5 figure voltage isn't fatal because of a lack of amps).

I asked an AI out of curiosity and, while I won't paste the response (feel free to ask one yourself), it gave a list of 20 methods, though I'd say this thread on its own covers about 9 of them, since some are different specific ways of doing similar ones (eg there were 4 based on moving something relative to a magnetic field).

hydro

Quickly boiling weird water then

The scientists didn't joke about that tokamaks will be a great neutron factory/highest neutron flux available. Yes, neutron activation of the reactor walls/components is a problem that we need to solve. However, transmutation of lithium to tritium is required for the reactor to work in the long term, so having a high neutron flux source is a plus in this regard. (and a negative in all aspects of structural integrity...)

The volume amount of activated material that would come out from tokamaks is a fraction compared to the literal tens of tons half-burnt uranium that takes way too long to decay to safe level. The more angrier the radioactivity, the less time it takes to decay away.

Fusion neutrons are able to cause fission in ordinarily non-fissile materials, such as depleted uranium (uranium-238), and these materials have been used in the jackets of thermonuclear weapons.

Fun(?) fact: something like 50% of the energy output of thermonuclear bombs comes from secondary fission events in the bomb casing triggered by the high energy neutron flux of the fusion reaction.

I'm sure there is a good reason why fission has always been "5-10 years till it's ready"

No idea why I am getting down voted. Helion's tech is a great alternative to steam for generating electricity from fusion reactions.