One of the fusion startups says they can use the plasma B field directly. Basically making the plasma the rotor in an electric generator to induce current in a wire.
same shit every day, on god
Submitted 2 weeks ago by fossilesque@mander.xyz to science_memes@mander.xyz
https://mander.xyz/pictrs/image/38ae5d88-8e7e-45c6-9be1-95556d1bb1c8.png
Comments
socsa@piefed.social 2 weeks ago
pennomi@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
I really like this concept, wonder how viable it really is though.
theneverfox@pawb.social 2 weeks ago
It seems promising, they’re acting like they’re close. They’ve been promising concrete deliverables, I think they’re supposed to have a working model that can actually capture the energy next year
You never know, but they’re called Triton if you want to check them out. They don’t share progress often, but when they do it seems pretty candid about their progress
finitebanjo@piefed.world 2 weeks ago
This plasma. Does it contain any water vapor?
Fuck_u_spez_@sh.itjust.works 2 weeks ago
It’s boiling water all the way down.
Seriously though, it’s over 100,000,000° so probably not.
Stowaway@midwest.social 2 weeks ago
The one im aware of uses deuterium, aka hydrogen2, to generate helium 3. One of the byproducts being tritium, aka hydrogen3. This means there’s potential for 2 deuteriums to mix with an oxygen molecule,this creating ²H2O, aka heavy water.
I’m neither a chemist, nor physicist. So someone could probably prove me wrong at the drop of a hat, but Im calling it close enough.:p
OrganicMustard@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Which one? My first impression is that ignoring all the energy in neutrons should be pretty inefficient
phcorcoran@piefed.ca 2 weeks ago
There’s a great video by Improbable Matter on YouTube breaking down the issues with helion , well worth a watch https://youtube.com/watch?v=3vUPhsFoniw
markhepburn@programming.dev 2 weeks ago
www.youtube.com/watch?v=m_CFCyc2Shs I don’t listen to Lex much these days, but that was a fun discussion.
EndlessNightmare@reddthat.com 2 weeks ago
Maybe it’s based on this: en.wikipedia.org/…/Magnetohydrodynamic_generator
ininewcrow@lemmy.ca 2 weeks ago
Why don’t we just pipe our water all the way out to the sun and pipe the steam back to earth.
TachyonTele@piefed.social 2 weeks ago
That’s silly.
Clouds would knock the pipes down.Wilco@lemmy.zip 2 weeks ago
I was thinking you could put giant fans on it to blow the clouds away, but then the moon would also knock it down once you got up that high.
ininewcrow@lemmy.ca 2 weeks ago
Then we have to get rid of the clouds
markz@suppo.fi 2 weeks ago
How long is that gonna take? A few decades?
-Sam Altman, when he hears about this
dogs0n@sh.itjust.works 2 weeks ago
Don’t worry, once we set it up we’ll have a consistent supply.
shadowwwind@beehaw.org 2 weeks ago
By next year
~ Elom musk
MedicPigBabySaver@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Oh yeah! I did that for my house. We have free heat and power. It’s a bit of a pain in the ass to build the pipeline that far out and it took me many more hours than expected, but, the system toots along just fine.
treadful@lemmy.zip 2 weeks ago
I’m curious if it would even be thermodynamically possible. If we could magically run a pipe that far, would the heat from the water radiate into space before it reached earth to do anything useful?
Someone get XKCD to do a video short on this.
mojofrododojo@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
i imagine filling any sized pipe to 1au would use most of the water on earth.
tempest@lemmy.ca 2 weeks ago
What if instead of a pipe to return the steam we use a freaking laser beam!
hperrin@lemmy.ca 2 weeks ago
Because it would cool down on the way back.
ininewcrow@lemmy.ca 2 weeks ago
We just have to pipe it faster
lemmydividebyzero@reddthat.com 2 weeks ago
What a stupid suggestion…
Let’s instead move the earth closer to the sun and boil the oceans directly…
gandalf_der_12te@discuss.tchncs.de 2 weeks ago
building a pipe all the way to space would mean the pipe would have to sustain its own weight, which is the same problem as a space elevator. that doesn’t work either because there’s no material on earth strong enough to support its own weight over that distance.
Trainguyrom@reddthat.com 2 weeks ago
Reminds me of one of my favorite photos, a steam engine being delivered by steam engine!
AngryCommieKender@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Derail Valley Simulator won’t let you drive that exact steam engine, but it simulates Diesel, Steam, and an Electric engine quite satisfactorily. To the point that I can’t use the steam engines without blowing them up accidentally.
Trainguyrom@reddthat.com 2 weeks ago
But more seriously, watch the water in your sight glass, keep it about 3/4 full at all times and check it like you check your rear view mirror in your car, and don’t forget to open the cylinder cocks every time you stop (or at least when you first start moving) and you should be pretty good to avoid unexpected damage to your locomotive!
RedSnt@feddit.dk 2 weeks ago
Did you mean to say a nuclear reactor being delivered by steam engine?
Trainguyrom@reddthat.com 2 weeks ago
China was notably one of the last places on earth to retire steam locomotives from revenue service, only ending mainline steam in 2005 and reportedly ending the last branchline’s use of steam in 2023, but may still have some revenue steam service surviving elsewhere
Bosnia still has some revenue steam service at a coal mine (notably running locomotives built by Germany using prisoner labor during WWII that were designed to use minimal resources and with a design life of only 10 years)
SomeAmateur@sh.itjust.works 2 weeks ago
I wonder if nuclear would get more traction If it was pitched as enhanced steam power instead
birdwing@lemmy.blahaj.zone 2 weeks ago
“It’s a blockchain of an highly enhanced hydrogen process. Thanks to its quantum mechanism it manages to increase the energy output by a ton.”
Just tell that to investors and they’ll gobble it up.
Opisek@piefed.blahaj.zone 2 weeks ago
Yeah, sure, but I’m just not seeing enough labubu in your concept.
zarathustra0@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
I wonder how fast we could get a steam engine to go if we stuck the a suitably shaped non-critical amount of plutonium in the firebox.
Bluewing@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Reading the comments, it would seem most everyone here thinks that the usefulness of the steam is done when it gets used to turn a turbine at high pressure.
The steam can be used for much more than once. In the 1800’s and early 1900s when steam ran trains and ships, they built double and triple expansion engines that took the energy of the steam two and three times before it was done. It doesn’t need to be one and done. And when the energy is done being harvested for power generation, it can used for other things. Engineers today aren’t dumber than the ones in the 1800s.
I can remember a small rural Minnesota town that had their own coal fired electric plant. (Built back before the REA was a thing). They took the left over steam from power generation and then piped it to around 200 homes in the town and heated them with the leftover steam. While a bit costly to install, it was dirt cheap to run. Those homes lost all that when the power plant was shut down and they had to switch to either natural gas, fuel oil, LP, or electricity.
So don’t get hung up on just the power generation. Think what could be beyond that point.
BananaTrifleViolin@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Also the water is just a medium for energy transfer; it can be reused & recycled in near perpetuity in a closed system.
We’re used to open systems with water in power systems, including cooling towers etc, because water is abundant on earth and we probably take the whole thing for granted. But it could be engineered to be a closed system a bit like a coolant in a refrigeration unit cycling back and forth.
homura1650@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Municipal steam networks are still operating today.
For new infrastructure, Electricity is just so good enough, that it is hard to justify building out partial alternatives like steam pipes. But where we already have them, they are still useful.
Hotzilla@sopuli.xyz 2 weeks ago
All large cities in Finland are heated by combined heat and power (CHP) power plants.
These power plants first make super heated steam (like 800°C, 1500°F), runs that through turbine to make electricity, then send the cooled down water (80-150°C, 170°F-300°F) to all homes through district heating grid.
From that water the home is heated and hot water is used.
Now that we have the district heating network, when electricity is cheap, we can also use electricity to boil the water and send it through the grid.
Smaller cities use just heat plants, were there is no turbine for electricity generation, just the heating of water to district heating grid.
Most plants use biomass as power source in the power plants, historically they were coal, but it has been now almost completely phased out.
NotMyOldRedditName@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
The same principal has been tried with crypto mining.
Capture the heat and use it elsewhere like to heat the building.
Downside for heating buildings though is unless you’re doing it somewhere where it’s always cold, you eventually still end up heat you can’t use, and at that scale, there’s better heating choices. I heard the city of vancouver was looking into heating a swimming pool with it, at least that would have a constant use.
Then you still end up with the issue of the mining cards only being good for 2-3 years before the tech improves and they aren’t mining efficiently anymore, which then just leads to more e-waste.
But imagine if the cards themselves had a really long useful life or were super cheap and easily recyclable, we could put miners in things like space / baseboard heaters which were already going to be doing resistive heating and then gain something from that instead of just heat.
merc@sh.itjust.works 2 weeks ago
A good example of how you can do amazing things with steam is looking at the very last of the steam locomotives. Before they switched to diesel or electric, the steam locomotives were engineering masterpieces. Yes, you still got the classic steam locomotive puffs of steam coming out of the locomotive, but they only let the steam go once they had extracted the maximum possible energy from it.
Here’s a good video going over the whole design.
SaveTheTuaHawk@lemmy.ca 2 weeks ago
Steam had several technical and power limitations. It was dropped very quickly when electrification was an option.
Meron35@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Low key this is a great way to convince people to switch away from fossil fuels.
Most people seemingly don’t know that coal/gas stations work by essentially boiling water. Most are horrified at how trashy and underdeveloped the concept is compared to high tech alternatives like solar, wind, or hydro.
Cliff@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
You can transfer gas to electricity without boiling water. But it is much more efficient to combine it with boiling water
SmokeyDope@piefed.social 2 weeks ago
“Dyson Spheres? Look, playing with sunlight and mirrors was a fun side project, but you want to know a much more advanced method of generating power?”
“Please dont….”
“Thats right! By hurling entire water worlds into a star, we then capture the released steam which powers our gravitationally locked dynamo network.”
Kolanaki@pawb.social 2 weeks ago
We live in a Steampunk world.
MiddleAgesModem@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
It’s always been about finding new ways to spin a turbine
gandalf_der_12te@discuss.tchncs.de 2 weeks ago
There’s only 3 major ways to transform different forms of energy into electricity, which are:
- solar panels (light -> electricity)
- mechanical engines/generators (mechanical movement -> electricity)
- electrochemical battery (chemical dipole -> electricity)
there’s a whole lot more, such as thermoelectric generator and piezoelectricity but these are the three significant ones.
NauticalNoodle@lemmy.ml 2 weeks ago
use cherenkov radiation to power photovoltaic array.
FaceDeer@fedia.io 2 weeks ago
Just pipe the electroplasma directly into the workstations. Sure, sometimes this results in dangerous overloads during adverse conditions, but that's what the Cordry rocks are for.
MissingGhost@lemmy.ml 2 weeks ago
Living somewhere that makes 90+% of its electricity from hydro, I am slightly confused.
gmtom@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
There are actually versions of fusion reactors that use the magnetic fields generated by the plasma in order to make electricity directly.
MonkderVierte@lemmy.zip 2 weeks ago
Wasn’t there one concept too with catching neutrons directly to …generate heat, ah right.
woodenghost@hexbear.net 2 weeks ago
In Germany, funding for research is being cut alot. The solar cut happened a long time ago and fifty thousand jobs where lost at the time. Last year, they basically cancelled almost all battery research (needed for electric cars and stuff). Now, many more important stuff is being refunded. Except for fusion. Fusion is receiving a big boost in funding. Everyone and their dog are doing fusion research now
I think, that’s not despite the famous “fusion constant” (fusion being always “only” thirty years away), but because of it. Unlike solar or batteries or anything else that actually works, fusion does not threaten to disrupt the oligopolies of the power companies, or the car companies or anyone else’s. It enables a wealth transfer (accumulation through dispossession) to companies involved in the research, without contributing to the crisis of overaccumulation, because no use value exists, so no value ever needs to be realized. It’s like building a pyramid in the desert.
MentalEdge@sopuli.xyz 2 weeks ago
Well, you can apparently also use supercritical carbon dioxide.
That might be fun.
But you’re basically still boiling something to make it spin a magnet.
Deconceptualist@leminal.space 2 weeks ago
Hey now, we could also use this technology breakthrough to move water from a low elevation to a higher one.
Devial@discuss.online 2 weeks ago
Most common fission reactions today release most of their energy in the form of neutrons. The only way to extract energy from neutrons is heat. But there are fission reactions which release a large portion of their energy in the form protons. And since protons are charged, their energy can be electromagnetically converted directly into electricity, with no need for intermediate process steps.
There’s already at least one company building prototypes like this, Helion, using D+He3 fusion, rather than the more common D+T fusion in other reactortypes like Tokamaks.
Real engineering has a video on Helion: www.youtube.com/watch?v=_bDXXWQxK38
Saarth@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
With rising sea levels and general water shortages, why don’t we also use them as desalination plants?
Surely there has to be a way to deal with brine, it’s just salt and water after all?
Ghyste@sh.itjust.works 2 weeks ago
Why is that a problem, exactly?
MisterFrog@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
melfie@lemy.lol 2 weeks ago
Dihydrogen monoxide is potent greenhouse gas that has caused many deaths, and we should stop using it to generate power.
rumba@lemmy.zip 2 weeks ago
Somebody was using the push against magnetic confinement in a pulse reactor to harvest magnetic - > electric directly but it’s been a while since they’ve been in the news.
gravitas_deficiency@sh.itjust.works 2 weeks ago
Could be supercritical CO~2~, actually
m3t00@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
you have a better plan?
ZoteTheMighty@lemmy.zip 2 weeks ago
Fusion releases a daughter particle and a neutron. Thr daughter particle is much larger and will deposit its energy back into the plasma, the neutron will travel much further until it hits a collector outside the chamber, heating it up, which will heat water. You don’t get to decide which direction the neutron goes, so you have to build this absorber around the entire thing.
compostgoblin@piefed.blahaj.zone 2 weeks ago
Steam makes the magnet go spinny
HenriVolney@sh.itjust.works 2 weeks ago
Every damn power plant is a glorified steam engine
hades@feddit.uk 2 weeks ago
Except solar. And wind. And hydro.
OrganicMustard@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Some solar is also boiling water
xx3rawr@sh.itjust.works 2 weeks ago
Expect for solar, it’s all just flowy stuff through spinny stuff: wind, water, steam. GRAAAAAAAAAA
Skullgrid@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
wind is just the effects of premade steam
TachyonTele@piefed.social 2 weeks ago
Hydro also uses steam
fullsquare@awful.systems 2 weeks ago
and fuel cells
JakenVeina@midwest.social 2 weeks ago
I dunno if “power plant” quite fits for solar and wind. Definitely for Hydro, though.
Shanedino@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Isnt hydro in a small part powered by steam just post condensation steam.
KittyCat@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
And theoretically a massive proton exchange plant.
HenriVolney@sh.itjust.works 2 weeks ago
Are these really power plants? I thought they were called field or farm or something else
magic_lobster_party@fedia.io 2 weeks ago
We’re living in a steampunk world after all
Slovene@feddit.nl 2 weeks ago
I’m a steampunk girl
In a steampunk world
It’s not a big big thing if you steam me
Cethin@lemmy.zip 2 weeks ago
I’m going to be this person I guess, but the defining trait of steampunk isn’t the use of steam alone. It’s that energy is transfered by delivering steam to where it’s used, rather than using it in-place to crested electricity. This means that steampunk machines operate off of some kind of kinetic energy, rather than electrical energy.
mossberg590@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Readily available, low boiling point, non corrosive (relatively), and ecologically safe. What more do you want?
MutantTailThing@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Also a ridiculously high heat capacity. It does make sense.
ricecake@sh.itjust.works 2 weeks ago
Molten salt. Lower pressure, higher efficiency, and I believe less reactive in the event of an uh-oh.
partial_accumen@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Hydro isn’t. Nor is solar photo voltaic, wind, or tidal, but yeah, nearly everything else is. In a combined-cycle natural gas or diesel plant half of the power generated isn’t steam power, but the other half is.
imsufferableninja@sh.itjust.works 2 weeks ago
Hydro is liquid steam
fullsquare@awful.systems 2 weeks ago
for ccgt it’s more like 2/3 for gas turbine, 1/3 for steam turbine split, even more uneven for diesel/steam because diesel exhaust is much colder
Zaphod@discuss.tchncs.de 2 weeks ago
I watched a video a while ago about a new approach to fusion which uses induction iirc youtu.be/uRaQLZaaHWo