I love that deep down, coal, gas, nuclear, this thing… all done to heat water, make steam, use steam to turn turbines…. We are just in a steampunk universe
When I was 7-8 (when the song was popular) I thought it was checks (cheques) for free. So I thought it wand money and checks (also money to a 7 y/o back when people paid with them at grocery stores still).
Didn’t realize it was chicks until the 90s when I became interested in chicks.
Yeah, they do, and get incinerated, unfortunately. A few every day, actually. Which is one of the reasons those never took off. Besides big upfront costs for the tower generator, there are additional costs for maintaining the generator with moving parts, and then for scraping the dead birds off the mirrors to top it off. All just to save a few pennies on mirrors instead of just chucking a bunch of solar panels into a field and mostly forgetting about them.
Never sell proven chemistry or physics short. Water transforming to a vapor is awesome. Maybe we could harness the energy of water transforming to a solid too.
The thing is: transforming into a solid is usually caused by removing energy from matter. The real reason steam is so great is because we put energy into it to make it steam and when the steam turns a turbine, we are converting that chaotic energy into directional, controlled energy.
Ohhh right that makes sense. I was only thinking of ways to use rocks to boil water to make electricity. So I missed geothermal and disregarded photovoltaics.
Unless you're talking about when water converts to steam, in which case it expands by over a thousand times its original size, and the expansion is what provides usable energy and not the temperature differentials.
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.
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.
It should be, if even that, but as usual there's people who take jokes far too far. Like, I'm sure there's a Church of Flath-Earthism recognized somewhere. In the US. Southern US.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
It's great that the field of biology (and medicine) are having new developments. I hope that the discoveries become more widespread though, because I do not want Peter Thiel to live forever while grandma has to die of a preventable disease at 75. I heard about Joe Rogan talking about "just treating covid with monoclonal antibodies" which feels indicative that some of this shit has already been made available to the rich, and fucking no one else.
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.
semiconducter logic gates to q-bit logic gates is just “using physics to direct electrons again”.
I mean, even if they start getting quantum programming off the ground, no one is going to be able to afford the fucking computers. We can't even afford non quantum computers anymore.
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
Layer 8 is colloquially the User, as that is the next "layer" up above the application. Only really used in a troubleshooting context indicating where the issue took place, it's the networking equivalent for an PEBKAC (problem exists between keyboard and chair). For this analogy, layer 8 would probably be physics itself though.
I felt the OSI model was pretty relevant because while speeds and latency has improved astronomically, it is all still run off of the Ethernet framework and the humble copper twisted pair and fiber optic cable aren't really substantively different than they were in the 70s.
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.
I doubt it, calibrating a focal point to a stationary, relatively nearby target, say a hundred metres or so, is fairly simple, but to apply that to a satellite, a moving target (with a changing velocity if we are talking about a satellite in an eccentric or molnya orbit) either in high or low earth orbit, that's a distance of between 200-20,000kms.
Even a satellite in perfectly circular orbit is constantly changing its distance relative to a point on the ground, meaning you have to constantly adjust the focal point of the mirrors. At 250km, your field of mirrors (say, a 100m circle of them) would describe about 0.023 degrees of curvature, almost completely flat.
And that's before accounting for atmospheric attenuation and scattering of the light.
On a clear night with many gw of laser energy, maybe you could peel the skin off a low orbit satellite, but even that would be impractical.
The mirrors used in these kind of installations are typically rotated to track the sun. Idk if it could take down a satellite but I would imagine they could set nearby things on fire by adjusting mirror angles.
Atmospheric scattering would make that effectively impossible, even if you could rotate the mirrors quickly enough. The light rays would be too unfocussed to properly heat up anything in orbit
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.
Looks like the first is still producing power, but the electricity being generated ended up being much costlier than photovoltaic panels (since they didn't anticipate they would become so cheap back when it was being constructed) and the people running it want to shut it down. And the latter was shut down after the company went bankrupt twice.
Wot if instead of boiling water, we boiled CO2, and instead of boiling CO2, we kept it at high pressure so that it never quite reached boiling or condensation?
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.
ACTUALLY ITS BOILING SODIUM!!…
which then gets used to boil waterI love that deep down, coal, gas, nuclear, this thing… all done to heat water, make steam, use steam to turn turbines…. We are just in a steampunk universe
Always has been.
Solar panel projects, which many have outstripped this and other projects in power limitations, do not boil water to generate electricity.
And wind turbines, and hydroelectric plants.
But all but solar cells are pretty much turbines all the way down
Hydroelectric power stations still rely on steam, it's just in another part of the cycle.
What? Hydroelectric power stations use gravity and the falling or flowing water makes the turbines turn. No steam.
Thermal plants (nuclear, coal, gas), including solar thermal plants, use steam.
He means water vapour, ie the rain cycle.
That's not steam, though.
Would not like to be the technician working on the hydrostation where part of the rain cycle is steam
Ooooooooh.
They use steam condensed in a pressurized environment
And to be fair, those none steam sources, i.e. hydro, wind and solar are all just solar basically.
Well there hydro power, where we just skip the boiling part and have water turn turbines.
What about tidal?
terrible platform
Underwater turbines.
sometimes birds turn turbines, what when they fall down with the water. also fish i guess, but i got a vendetta against the birds.
Are you suggesting we should boil them first?
dude i lost track are we talking about billionaires again
Supercritical CO2 turbine be like: whatup
Yeah but, really all these are just turbinepunk because in the end we're pushing the turbine either by using steam or natural wind.
Hey man I just want warm noodles
This is the revelation my mustache has been waiting for.
Oh neat like the ones outside Vegas, I always wonder if birds fly into the center
Well they certainly don’t fly out of it
The ones with cameras might, probably a big conspiracy
Moths must love this shit
Curious how well it works with moon reflection
Technically still solar power, but with the moon as an additional mirror in the system.
A construction like this could never work with moonlight, not even theoretically. There is a nice xkcd about it: https://what-if.xkcd.com/145/
The sodium probably gets hot enough to keep glowing overnight
Sadly the ones outside Vegas are about to shut down because they are not profitable https://live-ier.pantheonsite.io/big-green/california-shuts-down-its-solar-thermal-plant-13-years-early/
I love how fucking biased that article is. It mentions Obama like 10 times, including this gem:
Thanks for the hindsight, moron writer guy. So what's trump doing, investing in better renewables?
No, instead of building an underperforming power plant, he spent the same money just to prevent a power plant from being built.
Money for nothing and the chicks for free amirite.
I thought it was chips for free until my late twenties.
When I was 7-8 (when the song was popular) I thought it was checks (cheques) for free. So I thought it wand money and checks (also money to a 7 y/o back when people paid with them at grocery stores still).
Didn’t realize it was chicks until the 90s when I became interested in chicks.
Yeah, they do, and get incinerated, unfortunately. A few every day, actually. Which is one of the reasons those never took off. Besides big upfront costs for the tower generator, there are additional costs for maintaining the generator with moving parts, and then for scraping the dead birds off the mirrors to top it off. All just to save a few pennies on mirrors instead of just chucking a bunch of solar panels into a field and mostly forgetting about them.
big advantage is that molten salt allows for energy storage for nighttime
But then you also have to re-heat it in the morning with combustibles to kickstart the generation again.
Free roast pidgeon for the workers
Yeah, but that secretly a lazer weapon.
I have a theoretical degree in physics
it better be a degree celsius
It's in kelvin
The home alone guy?
Not a degree then.
Absolutely
TIL
Welcome aboard!
You activated ARCHIMEDES?! What the hell are you thinking?!
Never sell proven chemistry or physics short. Water transforming to a vapor is awesome. Maybe we could harness the energy of water transforming to a solid too.
The thing is: transforming into a solid is usually caused by removing energy from matter. The real reason steam is so great is because we put energy into it to make it steam and when the steam turns a turbine, we are converting that chaotic energy into directional, controlled energy.
https://youtu.be/HSvguJ7u3VM
I knew what video it was before I clicked, love that guy XD
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?
Must be the water
I'm gonna need help identifying all of them. So far I have burn them, smush glowing ones together, and reflect radiation with them.
I'm sure we can think of more
Dam. Stack rocks to block water, use leaking water to turn propeller.
Ohhh right that makes sense. I was only thinking of ways to use rocks to boil water to make electricity. So I missed geothermal and disregarded photovoltaics.
Kickstart this new source of clean energy by burning fossil fuels and spraying CFCs into the air. A hotter planet means water boils easier! 😃
The efficiency of any heat engine comes from the difference between hot and cold, you can't get useful work if the water's already boiled.
Unless you're talking about when water converts to steam, in which case it expands by over a thousand times its original size, and the expansion is what provides usable energy and not the temperature differentials.
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.
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.”
Photovoltaics
in meme form
Instasaved!
Guess what I'm boiling with the power from that solar panel
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.
Really? I thought that was just a "sticker on the waterbottle joke"
It should be, if even that, but as usual there's people who take jokes far too far. Like, I'm sure there's a Church of Flath-Earthism recognized somewhere. In the US. Southern US.
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?
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.
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.
Friggin' CO₂ always causing issues.
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.
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.
Good news!
https://youtu.be/BNDrC6fkjf0
It turns out boiling water is a really good idea.
Especially when you make a good cuppa with it.
There are a lot of options, but water works, is cheap as hell, and spills aren't much of an issue.
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.
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.
It's great that the field of biology (and medicine) are having new developments. I hope that the discoveries become more widespread though, because I do not want Peter Thiel to live forever while grandma has to die of a preventable disease at 75. I heard about Joe Rogan talking about "just treating covid with monoclonal antibodies" which feels indicative that some of this shit has already been made available to the rich, and fucking no one else.
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.
I mean, even if they start getting quantum programming off the ground, no one is going to be able to afford the fucking computers. We can't even afford non quantum computers anymore.
I don't understand this layer stuff
Computer networking has the OSI model which I think is the analogy: https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/OSI_model
I had no idea there was a simple Wikipedia! I love these guys and am glad I'd donated when asked those times...
but those layers go to 7... layer 8?
Layer 8 is colloquially the User, as that is the next "layer" up above the application. Only really used in a troubleshooting context indicating where the issue took place, it's the networking equivalent for an PEBKAC (problem exists between keyboard and chair). For this analogy, layer 8 would probably be physics itself though.
I felt the OSI model was pretty relevant because while speeds and latency has improved astronomically, it is all still run off of the Ethernet framework and the humble copper twisted pair and fiber optic cable aren't really substantively different than they were in the 70s.
ok. thanks for the explanations and the references
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.
not illegal enough to stop it from being posted all over 小红书 that's for damn sure.
I'm not complaining, it's great.
Physicists just looove a hot shower
That's the reason why all electricity generation boils down to hot water.
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
Turbine go brr
How else are you going to make your tea?
soak newspaper in a damp mug like all statesians
fun fact, u can also boil opposed spy satelites with that setup
I doubt it, calibrating a focal point to a stationary, relatively nearby target, say a hundred metres or so, is fairly simple, but to apply that to a satellite, a moving target (with a changing velocity if we are talking about a satellite in an eccentric or molnya orbit) either in high or low earth orbit, that's a distance of between 200-20,000kms.
Even a satellite in perfectly circular orbit is constantly changing its distance relative to a point on the ground, meaning you have to constantly adjust the focal point of the mirrors. At 250km, your field of mirrors (say, a 100m circle of them) would describe about 0.023 degrees of curvature, almost completely flat.
And that's before accounting for atmospheric attenuation and scattering of the light.
On a clear night with many gw of laser energy, maybe you could peel the skin off a low orbit satellite, but even that would be impractical.
Can you elaborate?
The mirrors used in these kind of installations are typically rotated to track the sun. Idk if it could take down a satellite but I would imagine they could set nearby things on fire by adjusting mirror angles.
Atmospheric scattering would make that effectively impossible, even if you could rotate the mirrors quickly enough. The light rays would be too unfocussed to properly heat up anything in orbit
I know you don't know.
I do.
And no it cannot, that's only in fallout New Vegas. This is not possible to weaponize because: physics.
MA! NEW ACE COMBAT BOSS JUST DROPPED!!
Was gonna say. I definitely blew this thing up in AC4.
latin chanting intensifies
Supercritical CO2 is entering the chat
https://cleantechnica.com/2026/01/01/china-built-a-supercritical-co%E2%82%82-generator-that-doesnt-mean-it-will-last/
Compressed air.....turbines still going burr this whole time! Gravity pumping... Turbines!
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.
Ivanpah Solar Power Facility and the Crescent Dunes Solar Energy Project.
Looks like the first is still producing power, but the electricity being generated ended up being much costlier than photovoltaic panels (since they didn't anticipate they would become so cheap back when it was being constructed) and the people running it want to shut it down. And the latter was shut down after the company went bankrupt twice.
Meh, it works.
Boiled water gang
Hot hydro homies in your area
Wot if instead of boiling water, we boiled CO2, and instead of boiling CO2, we kept it at high pressure so that it never quite reached boiling or condensation?
Using water is cheaper and easier. That is all that stop your idea from being IRL.
"The only downside of your idea is that it is terrible."
This kills the crab
geothermal typically uses chemicals other than water because they have a lower boiling point
the specific chemical being cheap is relatively unimportant if it’s a closed loop. the cost is next to nothing compared to the whole construction
For now
shouldn't it boil so that it can expands and makes pressure to move a turbine?
why use energy to make a counter pressure
Supercritical phase, it still changes pressure with heat, but there's no abrupt phase transition. This increases efficiency somehow.
different tool for a different purpose. water has a large heat of evaporation which is something that allows for more compact turbines
sCO2 turbines are like 1/30th the size of an equivalent steam turbine.
It would also be ideal for high-efficiency, high-temperature hydrogen production.
if its just water boiling in a pot,can you just put a Turbine above the pot and use the steam to spin the Turbine?
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.
The movie Sahara did it.
Sahara?
What's the worst that could happen?
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.
I think it was worth the trouble until photovoltaic panels got really cheap...
The only problem being you shouldn't look directly at it...
Can't look directly at the sun either, people worship the sun...
Well yeah, just pointing out a slight QOL issue. There's good reasons why we tend not to build light sources as bright as the sun.
Supercritical CO2 gas turbines are also a possibility.
Hopefully this one directly shoves the electons. I'm scared of society's DHMO dependency.