It’s just used to scroll social media again isn’t it?
Meh, it works.
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.
Good news!
Hard to beat spinning a magnet to generate electricity, and it’s hard to beat boiling water to spin a magnet
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
Photovoltaics
Instasaved!
Actually if you look inside the cells it’s just a tiny little pocket of boiling water
😭
MA! NEW ACE COMBAT BOSS JUST DROPPED!!
Was gonna say. I definitely blew this thing up in AC4.
latin chanting intensifies
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.
It would also be ideal for high-efficiency, high-temperature hydrogen production.
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
Idk if it could take down a satellite
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.
How else are you going to make your tea?
soak newspaper in a damp mug like all statesians
ACTUALLY ITS BOILING SODIUM!!… ~which then gets used to boil water~
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
Well there hydro power, where we just skip the boiling part and have water turn 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.
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.
They use steam condensed in a pressurized environment
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.
Always has been.
Yeah but, really all these are just turbinepunk because in the end we’re pushing the turbine either by using steam or natural wind.
Supercritical CO2 turbine be like: whatup
This is the revelation my mustache has been waiting for.
Hey man I just want warm noodles
I have a theoretical degree in physics
Welcome aboard!
it better be a degree celsius
It’s in kelvin
Not a degree then.
Absolutely
TIL
The home alone guy?
The movie Sahara did it.
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
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:
Clearly, the Obama administration decided to spend taxpayer funds on a technology that was poorly conceived and quickly outdated.
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.
Moths must love this shit
For like… 0.002 seconds it’s gotta feel real great
At night?
Curious how well it works with moon reflection
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/
Technically still solar power, but with the moon as an additional mirror in the system.
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.
USSR also built an experimental power plant of this type. Sadly, it was closed and disassembled after the breakup of the Soviet Union.
They’re pretty neat. Since the molten salt core stays hot for a while after the sun goes down, in some high-output high-storage setups they’re cheaper than traditional PV panels + batteries while providing the same power.
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.
