• Zink@programming.dev
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      8 hours ago

      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)

  • jerkface@lemmy.ca
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    8 hours ago

    The nuclear batteries small enough for handheld devices that we’ve been reading about recently don’t use any water.

    • MystikIncarnate@lemmy.ca
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      8 hours ago

      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.

      • jerkface@lemmy.ca
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        7 hours ago

        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.

  • ShaggySnacks@lemmy.myserv.one
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    21 hours ago

    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.”

  • JackbyDev@programming.dev
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    1 day ago

    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…

    • I_Has_A_Hat@lemmy.world
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      8 hours ago

      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.

      • JackbyDev@programming.dev
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        8 hours ago

        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.

    • Cyrus Draegur@lemm.ee
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      1 day ago

      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)||

      • MehBlah@lemmy.world
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        1 day ago

        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.

        • Benjaben@lemmy.world
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          24 hours ago

          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.

          • xthexder@l.sw0.com
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            20 hours ago

            Well, now this is on my list of invisible things that scare me:

            • Radiation
            • Methanol fires
            • Supercritical steam jets
            • Benjaben@lemmy.world
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              17 hours ago

              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.

      • chaogomu@lemmy.world
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        1 day ago

        Molten salt?

        We can then use compressed CO2 in the place of steam to drive the turbine.

    • neidu3@sh.itjust.works
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      1 day ago

      Yes. Water + spicy rocks. Everything else is solar power, which is also nuclear power, but with the spiciness in the sky instead.

      • Blackmist@feddit.uk
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        1 day ago

        Fun fact. Coal plants release more radioactive materials than nuclear plants.]

        Except the ones that blew up. Those ones were extra spicy.

        • chaogomu@lemmy.world
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          22 hours ago

          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.

          • anomnom@sh.itjust.works
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            21 hours ago

            How many average coal plants per Chernobyl though. I suspect that number is surprising lower than the total number of coal plants.

      • Robust Mirror@aussie.zone
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        21 hours ago
        • 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
      • jagungal@lemmy.world
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        1 day ago

        I mean, radioactive isotopes are formed in supernovae, so it’s really just solar power from a different sun, right?

        • Buddahriffic@lemmy.world
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          6 hours ago

          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.

          • Zink@programming.dev
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            23 hours ago

            All power is nuclear power when you keep digging, whether rocks come into play or not!

    • Shiggles@sh.itjust.works
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      24 hours ago

      Most power generation is just steam spinning turbines. Solar’s just weird. Wind cuts out the steam loop.

      • captainlezbian@lemmy.world
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        20 hours ago

        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

        • reinei@lemmy.world
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          15 hours ago

          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!

    • mosiacmango@lemm.ee
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      16 hours ago

      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.

        • Tlaloc_Temporal@lemmy.ca
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          1 day ago

          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.

          • Tar_Alcaran@sh.itjust.works
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            1 day ago

            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.

            • Tlaloc_Temporal@lemmy.ca
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              24 hours ago

              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.

          • Zink@programming.dev
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            23 hours ago

            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.

            • Tlaloc_Temporal@lemmy.ca
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              22 hours ago

              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.

            • Illecors@lemmy.cafe
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              22 hours ago

              Not OP. I guess it depends on the frame of reference. Comparing to other inefficient methods it might seem OK :)

    • hobovision@lemm.ee
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      23 hours ago

      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.

      • Phoonzang@lemmy.world
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        16 hours ago

        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.

  • halcyoncmdr@lemmy.world
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    1 day ago

    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.

    • TranscendentalEmpire@lemm.ee
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      1 day ago

      Yeah, who would have guessed that modernity was invented by someone who stuck magnets to a fidget spinner and strapped it to a boiler.

    • subtext@lemmy.world
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      23 hours ago

      One could even argue that hydro power is just boiling water, letting it condense, and then letting it spin a turbine

      • halcyoncmdr@lemmy.world
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        23 hours ago

        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.

        • hunter@sh.itjust.works
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          23 hours ago

          They were speaking of the water cycle. It’s the naturally-filled part. Not necessarily boiled, but evaporated.

        • subtext@lemmy.world
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          23 hours ago

          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.

      • I_Has_A_Hat@lemmy.world
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        8 hours ago

        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.

    • usrtrv@lemmy.ml
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      1 day ago

      Wind? And binary cycle geothermal plants but not sure how common they are.

  • stupidcasey@lemmy.world
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    1 day ago

    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.

    • Rolder@reddthat.com
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      But it’s one of the most important steps because it’s where the actual electricity comes from.

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      into unstable isotopes

      No, they were there all along.

  • unlawfulbooger@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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    1 day ago

    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 :(

    • frezik@midwest.social
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      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.

      • Phoenicianpirate@lemm.ee
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        Sail ships continued to be used well into the 20th century. The absolute last purely sail powered warship served during WW1!