this post was submitted on 31 Mar 2026
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"That's it?! That's the nuclear power? That's just boiling water!"
Ancient meme I had back in the day...
Man... can you imagine? Someone could shut down the whole power grid just by watching all that water.
Didn't China recently use super conducting CO2 instead of water?
Supercritical CO2 has been looked at a lot for the Brayton cycle which can get 50% efficiency compared to steam that generally caps out around 34%
The US and china both published studies talking about a brayton turbine but to my knowledge no commercial plants running off of it have been built yet
Supercritical, not superconducting.
idk but you can also use molten salt
You can use molten salt to move and store heat but you don’t put it through a turbine. Molten salt systems run it through a heat exchanger that heats steam or CO2.
oh thanks i didnt know or forgot
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Can't find it for the life of me... Describing a web comic vs actually posting it always feels like a flop, but...
Aliens abduct a physicist, who doesn't seem to give much of a damn about the abduction but is instead enthused to learn about the alien tech on board, so they give him a tour of the ship. They get to the power reactor and start dropping a bunch of sci-fi jumbo about "We harness dark matter to... (sci-fi Ruth Goldberg machine) ...and finally, we use the heat it generates to boil water and crank a turbine!!"
*Physicist drops to his knees in despair and let's out a dramatic 'noooooo!'
Paraphrasing heavily due to having shit memory. I thought it was a SMBC comic, but... /shrug.
"And then, the power generated is used to heat water and generate steam!"
"No...."
"That steam is used to turn a wheel!"
"No! NOOOOOOO!!!!!"
"Hey dude, calm down."
-Actual exchange during first contact.
you did a good job i remember the comic
I was talking with my wife about a comic similar to that not even three hours ago so if you find it let me know cause I want to show her too.
* Looks up *
* Ahem *
Nuclear fusion existed well before physicists.
Even wind power still turns a generator, but solar is just completely different than everything else
But what if... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concentrated_solar_power
It's cheaper now to install panels over the full footprint of a concentrator than to build a concentrator and a small solar panel or any sort of solar thermal generator
But then we're not boiling something to spin a turbine, and what's the point in living then
They’re actually quite similar to thermoelectric generators. But the potential difference between two semi conductors is created by a heat differential rather than by photon excitation.
Thermoelectric generators have been used on various rovers and deep space probes as well as in remote lighthouses.
physicists looove hot showers! they're the best! so comfy ☺️
still waiting for someone to demonstrate a more efficient power transfer solution
You're in luck. Supercritical CO2 turbines are a thing now, and they're way more efficient because they don't involve a phase change.
It’s funny (in a sad and sardonic sense) - I pay attention to the energy industry and the outcry over data centers has got me watching these generators closely. If they deliver on their promises, they could represent a great way to deliver on mirror-based solar reactors in areas with limited water resources. (And to recapture and use waste heat from the servers of data centers.)
Society is on the precipice of investing a lot into increasing energy generation for data centers that have to be near the same sorts of resources that people need - fresh water, environs conductive to generating power, stable (enough) climates. But this technology is arriving/set to reach adoption just in time for this boom-bust cycle. All those data centers in populated areas already have a timer ticking for when the shell corps have their rugs pulled.
Unfortunately, there's no way to get energy out of waste heat that won't be spent pushing that heat a little harder. Already a significant amount of energy is spent cooling data centers, any attempts at energy recapture will just make that cooling harder.
The best we can do is something like district heating, because heat pumps can get over 100% effective efficiency.
The energy needed for phase change for supercritical CO2 is substantially lower than steam.
There’s more wiggle room. My understanding is that similar to heat pumps, they can build systems with different optimal temperatures, and even daisy chain them together. They’ll never make a perpetual motion machine, but they can waste less energy.
Got any sources on that? I would love to learn about some new tech in electricity generation.
One facility opened in China a couple weeks ago. I can't find the article that I read from the other day but this should give you some info
At some point you are going to need steam to spin a turbine to generate enough energy to compress the CO2.
Solar panels? Wind?
Solar cells, technically.
boiling water systems have a thermal efficiency of ~40% Solar cells are closer to 45% efficient
So line a nuclear fusion containment chamber with photovoltaic cells?
That's called a "Dyson sphere".
They would melt, but we do also have gamma voltaics which can use the gamma radiation from fission and fusion to generate electricity they just have an atrocious efficiency
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Helion is trying to build a fusion reactor that harvests the energy through electro magnetic induction.
Feels like putting the cart before the horse there.
I'll believe it when I see it. They have so many material science challenges ahead of them and aren't very forthcoming with progress.
fission. aside from the fact physicists didn’t invent either, we’ve yet to boil any water with fusion.
We've boiled tons of water with it, but there have been no functional turbines involved in a ten mile radius.
I've got to disappoint you. We've boiled water with solar to crank a turbine for electricity.
But is it closer or further away than 16 km to the nuclear fusion source?
Give me a concave mirror and I'll change that
Best I can do is a convex lens.
Iirc one of the theoretical ways of generating power with fusion is magnetohydrodynamic generators which use the magnetic field created by the plasma to generate an electrical current directly. Still theoretical though...
The idea that using steam loop to turn a turbine is mind blowing to some.
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