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.
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...
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)||
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
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.
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.
Piezo electricity too. It's very seldom used for power generation but does exist
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.
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)
You have to engrave special runes on these rocks for them to work.
I heard that some wizards on the remote island of Tayouan far east are very good at it.
Reminds me of https://xkcd.com/435/
Sometimes we take the hot rocks and ship them to other planets too.
Nuclear power is just steampunk with magic rocks.
Nuclearpower is just boiling waterI bet there is a way more efficient way to harness it that we are just missing too lol
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.
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?
There are some fusion designs that use direct energy conversion.
Some work went into fission designs as well.
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!
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!
Sheng Wang is hilarious! Seriously, if you like comedy then watch his stuff
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.
into unstable isotopes
No, they were there all along.
And then there are thermonuclear generators
plus a side of extra spicy landfill
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanford_Site
"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.
That's from building nuclear weapons though, not power
"what if fire... But... MOAR"
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.
Or melting salt, or whatever. But yes it's just making stuff hot.
And then using that salt to heat water into steam and using that steam to turn a turbine
We need high-efficiency thermoelectric generators.
