There are a lot of options, but water works, is cheap as hell, and spills aren’t much of an issue.
Physicists just looove a hot shower
That’s the reason why all electricity generation boils down to hot water.
They have (had?) these across the California border from Vegas. Bright as fuck, you could see them dozens of miles away when flying in on a plane, but couldn’t look directly at them.
It turns out boiling water is a really good idea.
It’s so crazy that we’ve found like six different ways to use rocks to boil water. You’d think there’d just be two or three
It’s going to be boiling water again… Isn’t it?
Turbine go brr
Are we against boiling water only because it is old? Because if that is the only problem and we are ok with reliability and efficiency than i will take old
It’s more that when you look at history and technological progress, and our (millenial’s) own view on technological progress, the current stagnation and the permeation of said stagnation is a pain point. Every time we look at the news, it’s something going fucking wrong, and never delivering on the promise of a better , brighter future.
We saw computers go from 100s of Mhz to 3 ghz ish and just get fucking stuck there. From 16 meg to 64 gigs, and now we can’t buy any ram. We had touch interfaces being able to show you an arbitary interface and instead of innovation, we got swiping through stupid videos. We look through the history we didn’t live through, and see that in the 20th century, we went through flight and rockets to the fucking moon and then nothing. We have a rocket going to the moon with people in it again for the first time since the 70s, and they aren’t even doing anything new, just flying around. We expected there to be fucking bases on MARS by the time we got to the distant year of TWO THOUSAND AND TWENTY SIX.
Even now, when we’re coming to harvesting power from the sun, in a seemingly new way (focusing it with mirrors onto salt) it’s just going to be the same shit, nothing new, no innovation. Just put the hot rock into water, and harvest it through steam power as if it’s the fucking 1800s.
Also, it has a light relation to the evolution inevitably creating crabs once again meme of Carcinisation.
Another way to look at it is comparing water to electricity itself. No one is complaining that going from the electric light bulb to vacuum tube logic gates to semiconducter logic gates to q-bit logic gates is just “using physics to direct electrons again”.
Boiling water is just the layer 1 physical transport, all the cool stuff is happening at layers 2-7. The real mind blowing breakthrough would be if they finally did something to fix layer 8, but I ain’t holding my breath.
Great comment!
I’m optimistic in the space of biology and biotechnology though. People are doing actual SciFi shit right now. We’ve got CAR-T tech, CRISPR that’s trivial to deploy, monoclonal antibodies, mRNA tech, microbiome science, DNA sequencing that is mind-blowingly good, large scale computational analysis and machine learning that’s decoding the noise of our genomes, rapid detection of pathogens with a MALDI-TOF, to just name a few.
It’s an insane time in biology right now, and it’s the current frontier along with computer science/ML.
Its more a commentary that most “new electricity source!!! Amazing!” Is a heat source thats boiling water to turbines which isnt a new method, its a new source of heat. So more a complaint about sensational headlines about electricity
I mean, is there a more efficient way to take raw energy and spin a turbine with it?
The issue is more the cost. For this you need lots of mirrors and a tower. Solar panels are just cheaper.
This has the benefit of not needing batteries since the molten salt stays hot long after the sun is down.
Photosynthesis?
Sahara?
Hopefully this one directly shoves the electons. I’m scared of society’s DHMO dependency.
Well molten salt batteries are a thing, I’m presuming this is to buffer the output of the solar and that the losses were deemed acceptable given the renewable nature of this.
Yeah, you can store the molten salt and its heat for when it’s needed even at night. But it is used to drive a turbine hehe
Supercritical CO2 is entering the chat
Compressed air…turbines still going burr this whole time! Gravity pumping… Turbines!
Don’t we try this every few decades and realize it’s not as great as it seems? There’s one of these in the American Southwest that wasn’t worth the trouble to operate.
In terms of badass things to build your civilisation around, though, every single bit of me wants to live in a city constructed around one of these bad boys.
Hell yeah I’ll get in a parade to worship one of those things, they’re insanely fucking cool.
The only problem being you shouldn’t look directly at it…
It’s just used to scroll social media again isn’t it?
Porn.
It’s technically illegal in China, but I don’t know how illegal.
It’s incredibly silly that even tho we advance the scale of power, with electricity, solar and even nuclear, all we use it is to boil water. We just can’t seem to be able t build any a more advanced mechanism, it seems.
I learned the other day there is a nuclear reactor in development that will use as primary coolant…molten lead.
Still use to boil water then, but pretty freaky still.
Water is a fucking insanely awesome material.
I think this may be due to the specific heat of water, no other substance matches it.
Fair point it’s been so long since I last took a chemistry course that if I knew anything cool and hidden about water, I’d have trouble resurfacing it. I do know they call it “dihydrogen monoxide” in some reports tho.
Hard to beat spinning a magnet to generate electricity, and it’s hard to beat boiling water to spin a magnet
Fair point magnets are basically a superpower by themselves.
So is water. Hard to beat a miracle fluid that covers most of our planet.
“Worldbuilders hate this trick! Cover most of your world in water so you have less stuff to figure out names for.”
I’d guess because its all heat energy in the end, so you need something that expands and compresses. The only alternative I suppose would be like sound waves, or mechanical energy, or whatever a battery does.
That does make sense, but then again, it’s been 2000 years and we can’t find something that boils, expands and compresses better than water? Or is t just because water is commonplace enough in comparisoan?
Somebody linked above to a new closed loop turbine design which uses supercritical CO2. I know from CO2 refrigeration that CO2 has some insane volumetric expansion based on temp which makes it a good candidate for use in a closed loop turbine system. Plus, because they’re running it through the turbine as a supercritical fluid, the density is higher than that of steam so it requires smaller turbines. The biggest issue is that because it’s super critical CO2 youre talking about working pressures well over 1000PSI. That doesn’t make it impossible to work with as we already know from CO2 refrigeration, but it does make it a bit more difficult than just boiling water.
I am sure that they have, but there’s a lot more to it than just that. They have to consider long term maintenance, safety, and availability of parts.
Water is known and well established, you can buy a lot of stuff right off the shelf and we know it’s short and long term dangers. Everything else gets expensive and unknown very quickly.
I always assume they had additives in closed loop systems, but you’re right you’d think there would be something.
Started looking into what liquids they are using and realized i was reading treatment chemicals they add to the boiler water. I know there’s some reactors that use molten salt, but they are just used as energy transfer to… the boiler full of water. Lol. The properties of water expansion from liquid to steam probably can’t be beat or it’s qualities of cheap, simple, good enough.
Photovoltaics
Guess what I’m boiling with the power from that solar panel
Instasaved!
Wind and photovoltaic have nothing to do with water
Mfw they use wind and photovoltaic energy to pump water to a high place so they can put it through a turbine later
Good news!
