this post was submitted on 05 Dec 2024
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I've always found it slightly funny that nuclear power is technically just a fancy steam engine.
Almost all power source that generate electricity are fancy steam engines.
Wait, it's all steam engines?
🔫 👩🚀🔫👩🚀 always has been
Never got this meme honestly, I should figure it out sometime 🔫🧑🚀🔫🧑🚀
https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/wait-its-all-ohio-always-has-been
What?!? It was always just a meme?!?
I thought it was a reference I didn’t get because I’m an old.
Always has been 👩🚀🔫👩🚀.
But actually that article is pretty thin. I believe it was originally a joke about how many astronauts are from Ohio, so they'd get to space and it would turn out the whole planet was Ohio. It is in fact a reference to real world thing, it's just a very obscure and absurd reference.
Hydro, wind, solar, and wave/tide energy capture are not.
The crazy part is photovoltaics are the only power source that doesn't spin something to make electricity. Truly an outlier.
Except the ones that are. (Concentrated solar power)
...and the fancy steam engine version of solar is probably greener to build that photovoltaics, since it's basically just a boiler and some mirrors.
Internal combustion engine based generators aren't fancy steam engines either - however, they have a lot in common still. It's still just a way to move around the spinny bits of an alternator/generator/dynamo/whatever
Not entirely true, there is the thermoelectric generator too. Though it's not very practical
There's one more outlier though which is Electrochemical cell, like galvanic element or voltaic pile
It was used around 1800 as a major electricity source, but I guess it quickly became uneconomical in 1866 or sth when the dynamo was invented.
Edit: wait yes, it actually says this in the second paragraph of the linked article:
Great call! Completely forgot about batteries and potato power sources!
Which requires them to output DC rather than AC, so they require inverters to change it to AC. It's handier for battery storage though.
Hydro is the most fancy steam engine since it waits for the water to recondense to make power.
Condensed steam.
Has anyone tried using cold steam yet?
Scientists are twenty years away from cold steam power generation
Wait so does that make wind power more or less fancy than hydro?
Air is a fluid, it's hydrodynamics all the way down.
Everything is a fluid. Sand is a fluid. Sand and water? Only sometimes.
Edit: this was not on topic, I just got mad at my old physics teacher for a second and channeled 16 year old me, sorry
It's cool. I get why it's easy to see the universe as various fluids. We are
Depends on the humidity
Photovoltaics have left the chat.
Well, wins turbines too
Piezoelectrics have left the chat
I never understood that either. It seems like the steam production is an extra step.
So my general understanding is that you can use a magnet to create an electrical current. Its like it pushes the electrons, like a paddle pushing water. So they coil a bunch of wire around a magnet and rotate the magnet, which moves the electrons in the wire and that gets you electrical power. But you need something to push that magnet around, so you attach that to a big ass fan and use steam to push the fan. That's your turbine. Nuclear power is just using a hot rock to make the steam. Hydroelectric power uses a river to push the turbine. Wind power is doing the same thing, just uhhh, with wind.
Jesus christ this comment deserves a noble prize. Incredibly succinct explanation of something I didn't get before.
Honestly, fantastic explanation!
It's pretty much the only pathway to make heat spin a turbine.
Well, efficiently, at least.
You can always heat up a hot air balloon and have it yank a system of pulleys, but you're gonna lose a lot of energy that way.
Turning heat into mechanical or chemical or electric energy directly is really hard, you know.
It's funny that you can get more energy from gas by using it to heat water and using a steam turbine to drive whatever. It's just not always practical.
I'm not really sure how else you'd do it. The energy we can get out of fission is in the form of heat, and steam isn't as compressible as just gas and it's easy to make with just heat. Combine that with electromagnetism giving you electricity by spinning some magnets around some coils, and there you go.
It's probably possible to get some air hot enough and do some fancy convection work to get it to spin a rotor, but that's going to be really inefficient.
You could also use the heat to make materials glow and put a solar panel nearby, but that's also going to be pretty inefficient.
Get beta radiation and then put the electrons directly into the wires.
One by one.
Artisanal, hand wrought electricity.
It's just taking advantage of the change in matter state. H2O expands ~16,000 times it's size when it boils from liquid water to gaseous steam. That increase in size means it wants to go somewhere else, we just control where it goes and it's relief valve happens to be going through a spinning wheel with magnets on it, inducing currents in the coils of wire around the wheel.
Yes it's way more complicated than that, but it's the best way we have of turning heat into electricity, so it's what we use. With the primary exception of solar, nearly every form of power production is using heat energy to indirectly spin a wheel.
I swear Nuclear Reactors were designed by a chemist with a grudge against a physicist and engineer.