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.
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."
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.
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.
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.
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 :(
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.
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.
"safe nuclear": Between 1944 and 1971, pump systems drew as much as 75,000 US gallons per minute (4,700 L/s) of cooling water from the Columbia River to dissipate the heat produced by the reactors. Before its release into the river, the used water was held in large tanks known as retention basins for up to six hours. Longer-lived isotopes were not affected by this retention, and several terabecquerels entered the river every day. The federal government kept knowledge about these radioactive releases secret.
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.