• DickFiasco@lemm.eeEnglish
    69·
    12 days ago

    I feel like the next big technological achievement will just be replacing water with some other fluid.

    “Steam cycle? No, this is the much more advanced glycol cycle.”

  • disguy_ovahea@lemmy.worldEnglish
    604·
    12 days ago

    I don’t know why this is constantly criticized as a method of energy capture. Liquids allow for maximum surface area contact, creating more efficient heat transfer from the irradiated rods.

    Armchair nuclear physicists should release an improved model before being so critical of the most effective and reliable method of energy generation we currently have.

    • Deconceptualist@lemm.eeEnglish
      10·
      12 days ago

      Also, water is an amazing coolant. At the molecular level its hydrogen bonding contributes to a bulk property called heat capacity that ends up much higher than most other substances, meaning it can soak up a ton of energy per unit volume (and later release that energy, e.g. into a turbine). And there’s even more of that heat capacity in the phase transition from liquid to steam and back. It’s crazy good.

      It’s also super cheap and abundant. The main reason water isn’t the coolant for nearly everything is that it can be corrosive. Also steam can be quite dangerous due to all that energy it carries.

    • azi@mander.xyzEnglish
      22·
      12 days ago

      I mean it does seem kinda weird that running a heat engine to run a generator is more efficient than using a thermoelectric generator with no mechanical inbetween step.

      • frezik@midwest.socialEnglish
        2·
        11 days ago

        Thermodyanmics in practice is weird like that. You would think solid state peltiers would be more efficient than a machine. Solid state usually is in any other application. Just this once, no, pelts kinda suck. They’ve been around for two centuries now and nobody has made a significant breakthrough to improve them.

          • tetris11@lemmy.mlEnglish
            2·
            11 days ago

            • where does hotty water go. If hotty water always hot can we always use the same water

            • are there no reactors that convert particle interactions into photons and capture it with photovoltaics?

            • azi@mander.xyzEnglish
              2·
              11 days ago
              1. Firefly make glow from food
              2. Solar panel make power from glow
          • beastlykings@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
            2·
            11 days ago

            The problem that I see is that unless that magic semiconductor is 100% efficient, turning all the heat energy into electrical energy, then there’s gonna be some left over, and things are gonna get too hot too fast too furious. So you’ll need to cool the thing, or part of it, maybe similar to a TEG using the Seebeck or Peltier effect?

            I have a few of these kicking around somewhere. They work, just not super efficient, at all, with current technology.

            My point is I feel like no matter what you’re gonna need extra parts to cool the thing. Water pumps etc etc. Why not just use steam? 🤷‍♂️

            Edit: nice diagram though!

  • Smokeydope@lemmy.worldEnglish
    291·
    12 days ago

    "Dyson sphere? Boooring. Every type 1 baby species always comes up with the same idea, ‘hey lets just surround a star with mirrors and directly harvest the energy! What could possibly go wrong?’ Besides the fact your 80% of the way towards turning the star into a fucking bomb (don’t ask how we found that out), its basic ass vanilla shit.

    Look, you don’t progress to a type three civilization by being uncreative hacks. Screw efficiency, the universe is our canvas and this is our art. No, we translocate entire water world planets and ice comets bigger than most moons using manufactured wormholes, hurl them into a designated star and use the steam produced to turn billions of giant turbines locked in orbit around the star. We then convert the mechanical energy to electromagnetic radiation pulses more powerful than neutron star pulsars and reflect them to nearby populated systems with mirrors. Take notes, monkeys."

    • frezik@midwest.socialEnglish
      4·
      11 days ago

      I put together a thing for a Starfinder session where this one civilization needed a stupid amount of power in order to save their planet from a coming catastrophe. I based it on a laser propulsion method with black holes:

      https://www.livescience.com/65005-black-hole-halo-drive-laser.html

      In short, you shoot a laser at a black hole, and it whips around and picks up energy (blue shifting it). When it comes back at you, you get more energy than you put into the original beam (the extra coming from the black hole itself, of course). The original proposal was for propulsion, but you should be able to do it for power, as well.

      I guess the only thing missing was making it heat up water to turn a turbine.

      • Smokeydope@lemmy.worldEnglish
        4·
        11 days ago

        When writing the “turning the star into a fucking bomb” bit I was actually thinking about the black hole bomb same process as you describe but instead of extracting the energy or momentum it gets fed back into the system forming a runaway feedback loop leading to super nova level explosion. I doubted that a fellow science nerd on lemmy would see this comment and notice the slight error, but I could also see a real scenario where you completely cover a star with mirrors to the point its own energy is radiated back into itself forming a similar feedback loop causing it to explode.

        • Echo Dot@feddit.ukEnglish
          2·
          10 days ago

          You can also use a variation on this effect to move star systems around. Surround a start with mirrors but instead focusing the light back to the star you make it focus it to a single point on the star. That single point becomes highly excited and erupts plasma at that location.

          Because this is an extremely energetic plasma eruption and it’s only on one side you get movement in the opposite direction. The stars gravity field will pull the rest of the system with it.

          You could only move it in the direction of the stars poles as unless you got really clever with timed pulsing (and I feel like that would be unreliable), you would vaporize any planets in the system.