They just found rocks that are naturally hot and boiled water with it… Engineering is a scam.
We have rocks that do math, transmit electricity, and fly us through the sky.
When you get reductive about the natural sciences it all just boils down to applied physics which is applied mathematics.
But engineering and technology? Applied geology.
(/s because I’m not going to acknowledge that geology is applied chemistry and so on)
Reminds me of https://xkcd.com/435/
Haha exactly.
I remember thinking about science hierarchy or levels of abstraction way back in high school, but I’m glad that (like so many things) xkcd perfectly documented it.
In a sense, you’re right. And there’s a bit of magic involved. If you cut a certain special rock into slices, engrave runes on one side of it, and inject lightning, the rock starts to think. I don’t see how you can describe that as anything other than magic.
Sometimes we take the hot rocks and ship them to other planets too.
The nuclear batteries small enough for handheld devices that we’ve been reading about recently don’t use any water.
Those have been researched and tested for decades and the tech still hasn’t caught on. They just don’t put out enough power to be useful for much more than a clock circuit (not even enough to power a full watch, just keep the time).
I have serious doubts they’re going to suddenly become viable anytime soon.
Any useful energy production from nuclear is basically just making steam to run turbines. Same with coal but you know.
I believe they have been used in pacemakers, for example. They are becoming practical for more applications over time and are seemingly on the verge of appearing in consumer electronics. We shall see.
RTGs also do not use water. I suppose the watch batteries are essentially just tiny RTGs.
Conceivably you could use bimetallic strips to produce mechanical energy from the heat generation.
So a nucler reactor is just a kettle with an extra spicy heating element?
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.
Except, even then, an average coal plant will release more radioactive material over its lifetime than Fukushima did.
It’s just Chernobyl that you have to top. And even then there are coal plants that come close.
Now, it’s not apples to apples. Coal plants release uranium and thorium. Not ceasium and strontium.
But yeah, never go swimming in a coal plant ash pit. For more than the obvious reasons.
How many average coal plants per Chernobyl though. I suspect that number is surprising lower than the total number of coal plants.
- Solar panels: Direct sky-spiciness to electricity conversion
- Wind: Sky-spiciness made the air move
- Hydroelectric: Sky-spiciness lifted the water up, gravity brings it down
- Fossil fuels: Really old stored sky-spiciness from ancient plants
Nuclear: the sky spiciness got too spicy and turned into spicy rocks
Geothermal?
Geothermal: Incredibly old sky-spiciness from far, far away that Earth collected to slowly release.
And ultimately just used to heat water.
A lot of that heat comes from decay of radioactive isotopes deep in the Earth. Still spicy rocks.
I mean, radioactive isotopes are formed in supernovae, so it’s really just solar power from a different sun, right?
It’s all gravity in the end. Or probably middle but I don’t know why gravity, so that’s as far as I can reduce it.
Everything we see around us is just hydrogen trying to get closer to the middle of the biggest hydrogen party it can find in the general vicinity. And we were all once part of at least one massive party that eventually got a bit out of hand when we all tried to get so close together we bounced off of a neutron star before it collapsed into a black hole.
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.
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.
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.
The best part of this game is that this conspiracy theory is incorrect. Fema killing Americans, illuminati, majestic 7, area 51, MIB: all real. Workplace persecution for a distrusted wounded war veteran?: crazed paranoia
Most power generation is just steam spinning turbines. Solar’s just weird. Wind cuts out the steam loop.
What about hydro electric? It uses cold steam
Ooh, cold steam burns are the worst!
Reflective solar is normal at least. But photovoltaics are weird. Even weirder is that they’re LEDs backwards, and the fact that transistors just are like that is why they’re encased in black plastic
Unless you WANT your transistor to be this way and use it so you put an actual led inside the plastic as well to mess with (i.e. turn on and off) the transistor!
Also I would argue that wind could also be considered ‘steam’ turning a turbine. It’s just vapour pressure ‘steam’ with a LOT of other pollutants which somehow increase the efficiency!
That’s not a spicy challenge id be willing to try.
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…
The only truly new method of power generation we’ve made in the last 100 years has been photovoltaic cells. Everything else is just finding new ways to make turbines spin.
That’s just boiling water with extra steps
That’s wrong statement
I’ve actually seen this same meme used in the opposite way where they did discover a new way but I don’t remember enough information to find it. And I don’t think it was talking about solar.
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)||
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.
Well, now this is on my list of invisible things that scare me:
- Radiation
- Methanol fires
- Supercritical steam jets
It seems you need to learn more about prions.
- Predators with cloaking devices
- Carbon monoxide
Definitely dangerous, but I’m less scared of that one. I’ve got detectors for that, and that’s more of a “go peacefully in your sleep” kind of danger.
The regular ones will kill you as well. Boiling water on a stove is nothing compared to steam under pressure.
Not quite invisible but you could also splash and wade into a pool of strong acid thinking it was water, during what first seemed like a somewhat routine FUBAR maintenance situation…filling your boots etc.
At paper mills the fear is caustic pools filled with bases.
The weird man-lifts used to get a side eye from me
Molten salt?
We can then use compressed CO2 in the place of steam to drive the turbine.
Tag yourself! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Refrigerant
Like Dr. Pepper?
It was interesting realizing that a lot of our power is still, at its core, a steam engine
We discovered a banger like 400 years ago and have held on tight until right 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.
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.
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.
Some cells are getting 47%, which is ridiculous for a generator! The theoretical maximum efficiency for solar cell from the sun as it appears in the sky is about 68%, so that’s pretty good!
However, how expensive is that cell going to be? How much maintenance does it need, and how fragile is the system once deployed? It’s very obvious that PV efficiency has beed skyrocketing recently, and I don’t thinks it’s stopping soon, but a commercial PV panel available today is just breaking 20% efficiency. Luckily, sunshine is quite abundant.
Not OP. I guess it depends on the frame of reference. Comparing to other inefficient methods it might seem OK :)
Mechanical engineers fist pumping after finding out their entire profession is not yet obsolete
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.
There’s also fuel cells, where fuel is not burned to create steam to move something, but combined with oxygen in a different way (the end products still being the same) so the electrons shuttled around during this reaction can be utilised as electricity. Think of combustion as oxidation of your fuel, the oxidation meaning that you (among other things) move electrons from the fuel to oxygen. In combustion, unfortunately you can’t access the electrons directly, as they are always stuck in the chemical bonds of the molecules, that’s why we take the detour via heat/mechanical - the steam engine. The fuel cell now separates fuel and oxygen, and thus divides the combustion reaction into two parts that happen at opposite sides of the cell. Those sides are divided by a membrane that does not allow the electrons to transfer across, so they need to take a detour through an electric circuit, in which we can harvest them as electrical power.
I always found it really fascinating that fuel cells are the only other technology than solar where the electrons we use as electrical power are more or less directly generated as opposed to the detour via a generator. Unfortunately, fuel cells are still a very niche technique.
This is reminds me of a quote from one of the Encased loading screens.
To paraphrase it “Power generation before was about turning a turbine with steam. Under the Dome we have this fancy technology that we use to…turn a turbine with steam.”
[Encased mentioned] I love that game
I have a play through of being a certified idiot. I have never laughed harder at things my character has done.
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.
Wind turbines also.
But some solar does focus it on a tower to make steam to drive a turbine.
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Yeah, who would have guessed that modernity was invented by someone who stuck magnets to a fidget spinner and strapped it to a boiler.
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.
They were speaking of the water cycle. It’s the naturally-filled part. Not necessarily boiled, but evaporated.
I know that… I was taking liberties to take hydroelectric power to its furthest logical extension by saying that the sun is evaporating (boiling) the water, it goes through the water cycle, it is deposited atop mountains or further upriver, and it then flows back down through the hydroelectric stations.
Piezo electricity too. It’s very seldom used for power generation but does exist
Oh yea! I forgot about that one! It’s starting to be used a lot in implantable medical devices to generate a small current. There was also that thing a few years back that was trying to use it to generate power from waves/tides; not sure if that actually got past the proof-of-concept stage though.
There are gas turbine generators that directly use shaft power to generate electricity
Wind? And binary cycle geothermal plants but not sure how common they are.
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Nuclear power is just steampunk with magic rocks.
God damnit Jinyang!
“You’re a old, and a fat”
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.
“This is you as an old man. I’m ugly and dead alone.”
Nuclearpower is just boiling waterI bet there is a way more efficient way to harness it that we are just missing too lol
You mean nuclear? Maybe if we could use the tech with fast neutrons from fission experiments in the rods we use to slow down the chain reaction?
I’m kinda surprised that nobody has harnessed our magnetic field to build a power source. Or at least tried. I have no idea how it could work, and I may be dumb as shit for this. But I feel like it could be possible if we had another 500 years left of society.
Hydro?
Nuclearpower is justboilingwaterSolar?
Nuclearpoweris just boiling waterIt can be done with boiling water, but it’s not very efficient.
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 :(
Big Steam is playing us for suckers!
They’re just spinning us in circles!
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!
There are some fusion designs that use direct energy conversion.
Some work went into fission designs as well.
Nuclear 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
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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:
And then there are thermonuclear generators
