New clean energy comes out. *look inside* It’s just boiling water again…

21 days ago by cannedtuna to c/science_memes

marcos 59 points 21 days ago

Most new clean energy does not use boiling water.

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Remember_the_tooth 39 points 20 days ago

Pushing electrons? Really? Man of your talents?

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fullsquare 12 points 20 days ago

there is a power generation scheme that uses high temperature fuel cells. optimally it could run on hydrogen only, but because it runs hot, it is able to take almost any flammable gas, along with some steam, and it forms hydrogen internally, then oxidizes it. this alone generates bulk of electricity, but offgas is hot, so it goes to heat exchanger which boils water, which then turns steam turbine

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grue 12 points 20 days ago

That's just burning a hydrocarbon with extra steps.

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fullsquare 12 points 20 days ago

it replaces gas turbine with a fuel cell, which is a good couple % more efficient than CCGT. still under development. there is also another variant where hot offgas is generated under pressure and expanded directly. no steam, same effect

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Tiempo 54 points 20 days ago

What is worst is that if we look deeper, we find out that everything is just turning the mill

The only advance would be solar that was capable of not using a mill that have to turn.... Everything else? Just a fucking mill

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Zorque 33 points 20 days ago

We rotate around the sun, though

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Tiempo 25 points 20 days ago

Fucking damn it!

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emmy5482 -1 points 20 days ago

We do, but that isn't a necessary component... Anyways, good joke.

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cypherpunks 12 points 20 days ago

i'm not a physicist but iiuc orbiting the sun is actually pretty necessary 🤔

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Robust_Mirror 4 points 20 days ago

To a solar panel functioning? Not really.

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Photonic 11 points 20 days ago

Looks like the Dutchies were right in the first place

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Gonzako 11 points 20 days ago

Nah, the dutchies also invented the stock market.

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thevoidzero 4 points 20 days ago

Solar and batteries (chemical). If we could harness lightening then that's come without mechanical energy as well. There's biological energy as well, we don't have a way to extract it directly as electricity but it exists

Mechanical and heat is just the most common way to get electricity for us at the moment.

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isekaihero 1 point 20 days ago

Conan's wheel of pain

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zqwzzle 42 points 20 days ago

Fun fact time oklo is the only known instance of a naturally occurring fission reactor.

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flambonkscious 11 points 20 days ago

Wow, that's mental

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jaygray91 3 points 20 days ago

An amazing TIL. Thanks!

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Bishma 34 points 20 days ago

Face it, all power is water, all stories are Hamlet, all food is grass, and all music is Pachelbel's Canon. Reality's budget is running out and it's having to reuse assets.

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captainlezbian 6 points 20 days ago

I'd love to see someone try to explain how As You Like It is Hamlet

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NewNewAugustEast 7 points 20 days ago

Both explore how characters must mask their true identities to survive a corrupt patriarchal system managed by a villainous uncle?

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infinitesunrise 2 points 19 days ago

Modern society as asset flip

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Sheldan 30 points 20 days ago

I love the description of PV to be basically 'outsourced fusion'

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SeeMarkFly 56 points 20 days ago

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LodeMike 7 points 20 days ago

Boiling water is the only reasonable way to turn heat into electricity.

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neuromorph 3 points 20 days ago

how is solar water based?

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LodeMike 13 points 20 days ago

Actually there's also the mirror based solar which boils water in a central column.

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rumba 12 points 20 days ago

It's cooler than that; they use the heat to make molten salt, then use a heat exchanger to boil water with that, the salt gets stupid hot and holds energy into the night.

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LodeMike 2 points 16 days ago

Sounds like it's hotter than that not cooler

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Smaile 3 points 20 days ago

its basically a bowl of water made of solar panels, i mean its not a bad idea at all but its nothing crazy either, probably a bitch to maintain tho.

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captain_aggravated 4 points 19 days ago

Photovoltaic panels don't turn heat into electricity. It turns light into electricity.

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dsilverz 1 point 19 days ago

Not meaning to be the achkshually guy, but, heat is a kind of "light" (EM radiation) within the Infrared range of the spectrum. We can't see it, but snakes can.

!science_memes@mander.xyz

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Zink 4 points 19 days ago

If I may achkshually your achkshually, I believe that heat is the energy in the collective motion of particles of matter, and infrared photons are one way that energy can be radiated away from one body and absorbed by another.

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captain_aggravated 2 points 19 days ago

I will uno reverse umm achkshually you. Heat is not synonymous with infrared light. Objects with heat will emit energy into their environment as EM radiation. That heat can also be conducted away through contact with another object.

All objects with heat do give off a wide spectrum of EM radiation, with the uppermost frequency being proportional to the object's temperature. A very cold object might only give off radio waves. Room temperature objects, like you, glow in the infrared. Above 500C or so, objects start glowing visibly red, then orange and yellow. A phenomenon we call incandescence.

Objects that absorb light can and often do increase in heat, PV panels turn some of the energy that strikes them as light into electrical energy rather than thermal energy.

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driving_crooner 3 points 20 days ago

Solar and wind biggest energy revolution is not needing to boil water

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CatAssTrophy 2 points 19 days ago

Hydro doesn't boil water, either. Just moves it around.

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LodeMike 3 points 20 days ago

Solar uses radiation not just heat.

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dan69 5 points 20 days ago

I’d like to thank some post on Mastadon, which really boiled down how and what a nuclear power plant works to provide power.. the little things.

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captain_aggravated 2 points 19 days ago

You've probably heard of an internal combustion engine, like what power cars and airplanes. Well there's such a thing as an external combustion engine - a steam engine. A steam engine just needs some source of high pressure steam, the source of heat you find to boil the necessary water is almost a separate problem. You could use a wood fire, a coal fire, an oil fire, a natural gas fire. I've seen a small steam engine that runs on a tea candle. Heat from a geothermal vent, concentrated sunlight, or nuclear power.

How about a diesel engine? Large oceangoing vessels with 2-stroke diesel engines the size of a duplex put out a lot of waste heat, plenty enough to boil water and run a steam turbine engine. The diesel engine provides main propulsion, the steam engine powered by its exhaust provides electricity. Ships with such a system can shut down their aux engines while underway saving tons of fuel per voyage.

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Lushed_Lungfish 3 points 19 days ago

Can't improve on perfection.

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infinitesunrise 3 points 19 days ago

Burgeoning supercritical CO2 turbine technology would like a word.

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woelkchen 3 points 20 days ago

Uranium is clean?

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chaogomu 25 points 20 days ago

Extremely.

Even adding in construction and mining, it has the lowest carbon per KWh out of any option. Even Hydro comes out worse, due to the years of carbon and methane emissions from the decaying plant matter at the bottom of the newly formed lake.

Wind and solar are down there, but the mining costs and the low output per unit tend to bump the numbers.

Noted, that's just the carbon released. There are other metrics, and nuclear tends to meet most all of them because it's very heavily regulated.

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Zagorath 9 points 20 days ago

This page's "Life cycle CO2 equivalent (including albedo effect)" page says Nuclear is just a hair worse than onshore wind in the median case, significantly worse than both on- and offshore wind in the worst case (worst for both types), and slightly better in the best case. In best case, hydro actually beats nuclear.

Also, TIL tidal power isn't commercially in use. I swear we were learning about it in school 20 years ago, and were not even told then that it wasn't viable.

Including the effects of albedo seems rather straightforward and worth doing. Of course it neglects some more complicated factors, like opportunity cost of staying on fossil fuels in the meantime for the 20+ years it takes to build nuclear. A convenient part of the reason that the biggest proponents of nuclear tend to be those politicians and special interests who also support fossil fuels.

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chaogomu 0 points 20 days ago

You don't need giant 20 year plants.

Small Modular Reactors can be built and deployed much faster.

You don't need to power an entire state with a single plant. You can scale it down to powering a single town. That's the current push, mass production of SMRs.

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CrabAndBroom 5 points 20 days ago

Humanity's relationship with producing energy continually blows my mind, and it's one of the main things that makes me think that maybe we do live in a simulation.

We discovered fossil fuel energy, which was fine for a bit to kick off the industrial revolution, but obviously is super harmful in the long term. Then just as it was starting to become a problem, the universe went "okay, here's this magic rock that just gives off energy, you can use that to generate massive amounts of power with no carbon." And we just went "nah."

So then, the universe is like, "alright then, how about this: you can just get it from the sun, the air and water. Again no carbon and it's infinite free energy forever, you're welcome." And again, we were like "no we want to just burn fossils." Even now at the ecosystem is visibly collapsing around us we're adopting it somewhat, but still dragging ass on it like crazy.

It's like whoever's running the simulation keeps dropping the difficulty level to help us not die, and we just won't accept it. I fully expect in the next century or so we'll figure out cold fusion, build like two plants and humanity will just collectively go "BORING" and dig up more coal again.

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fullsquare 4 points 20 days ago

Coal ash (from some mines) contains so much uranium that if emissions like this were detected near NPP all hell would break loose, but nobody cares. Energy content of that uranium can be higher than what was released during coal combustion

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woelkchen 0 points 20 days ago

"coal ash is worse" doesn't make nuclear waste clean and non toxic. Both are dirty, just different kinds of dirt. Geothermal is an excellent "boil water" technology independent of weather and without toxic waste.

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chaogomu 3 points 20 days ago

Coal ash is dumped into a retaining pond by the ton.

Nuclear waster is highly controlled and produced by the pound and sealed into giant casks that can be struck by a full speed train without beaching.

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fullsquare 1 point 20 days ago

there are still coal powerplants around and any replacement is better. geothermal doesn't work everywhere

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ricdeh 1 point 20 days ago

That's one hell of a claim. In fact such an outrageously bold one that you shouldn't be able to post a comment like that without citing a reputable source.

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SmoothOperator 8 points 20 days ago

Not OP but

https://ourworldindata.org/nuclear-energy

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Holytimes 7 points 20 days ago

It's not that bold or outrageous... It's been common knowledge for over 40 years.

Basically since the dawn of nuclear power plants we knew it was the cleanest form of energy generation. That was literally its selling point.

The problem was the fear of radiation if shit went wrong.

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oce 3 points 20 days ago

The consequence of this legitimate fear is crazy security and the cost of it. To the point where the cost of new nuclear now struggles to compete with renewables. The new generation plants EPR are catastrophic in terms of budget and schedule.

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Rainbowblite 0 points 20 days ago

The Nuclear industry actually makes an effort to clean up after itself. Coal wouldn't be such a big deal if they captured the carbon before it hit the atmosphere.

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chaogomu 0 points 20 days ago

It would take far more than just capturing carbon to make coal clean.

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woelkchen -4 points 20 days ago

Radioactivity isn't clean.

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cynar 4 points 20 days ago

Coal plants put out more radioactive material than even the bomb factories they call nuclear power plants. Newer plant designs are FAR more fail safe too, and some can actually 'eat' the waste from older plants.

New nuclear is right up there with renewables, with the added bonus of being great for baseloads. The only problem is we needed to be building it 20 years ago, since it takes a long time to design, permit and build them properly. If we try to rely on them now, it will be too late.

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0x0 3 points 20 days ago

since it takes a long time to design, permit and build them properly.

That's been rigged by design due to... interests... it doesn't take that long to build one.

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woelkchen -5 points 20 days ago

Class A whataboutism. Both are dirty, neither is clean.

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TwilightKiddy 8 points 20 days ago

If you wash it well enough.

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Whostosay 3 points 20 days ago

And eat all your supper

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grue 5 points 20 days ago

Yes.

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rumba -1 points 20 days ago

Relatively, yes, and not to mean somewhat. For the amount of power generated, the spent fuel/water is really not that significant.

Nothing is purely clean. Making solar panels and batteries isn't clean; it's just that coal and natural gas are extremely dirty on a mass scale, environmentally speaking.

If we could get the 'big scare' concept of Nuclear under control, we could make some systems that are even cleaner. There's no apetite for that though.

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woelkchen -1 points 20 days ago

Relatively, yes, and not to mean somewhat. For the amount of power generated, the spent fuel/water is really not that significant.

Absolutely speaking, controlling nuclear waste for hundreds of thousands of years is impossible and any rationalization when cheaper and regenerative options exist is idiotic.

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rumba 0 points 20 days ago

controlling nuclear waste for hundreds of thousands of years is impossible

Purchase 10 sq miles iround a mine Fill below any water table, fill with concrete

Deep drill past aquifers drop waste in hole.

Not cheap, but you can really do that.

any rationalization when cheaper and regenerative options exist is idiotic.

Ignoring options with the benefits of 24x7 steady state generation is far more idiotic.

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woelkchen 1 point 20 days ago

Purchase 10 sq miles iround a mine Fill below any water table, fill with concrete

And that concrete is 100% carbon neutral and will never be affected by earthquakes.

Deep drill

When drilling is suddenly OK, then forego the nuclear reactor and go straight to geothermal.

Ignoring options with the benefits of 24x7 steady state generation is far more idiotic.

Tell that to your nuclear waste buddies who oppose geothermal.

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ivanafterall 1 point 20 days ago

"You wouldn't like me when I'm angry." -Uranium, Star Wars

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