Oh neat like the ones outside Vegas, I always wonder if birds fly into the center
Gotta go fast
Submitted 2 weeks ago by fossilesque@mander.xyz to science_memes@mander.xyz
https://mander.xyz/pictrs/image/5f155fbe-0f24-443a-b931-920c5a9e1946.jpeg
Comments
ascend@lemmy.radio 2 weeks ago
BluJay320@lemmy.blahaj.zone 2 weeks ago
Well they certainly don’t fly out of it
ascend@lemmy.radio 2 weeks ago
The ones with cameras might, probably a big conspiracy
inari@piefed.zip 2 weeks ago
Moths must love this shit
Wakmrow@hexbear.net 2 weeks ago
For like… 0.002 seconds it’s gotta feel real great
errer@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Sadly the ones outside Vegas are about to shut down because they are not profitable …pantheonsite.io/…/california-shuts-down-its-sola…
ByteJunk@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
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Clearly, the Obama administration decided to spend taxpayer funds on a technology that was poorly conceived and quickly outdated.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. Now how about we replace all those heliostats with modern solar panels? Sounds like a great opportunity…
SubArcticTundra@lemmy.ml 2 weeks ago
Free roast pidgeon for the workers
drath@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
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.
fullsquare@awful.systems 2 weeks ago
big advantage is that molten salt allows for energy storage for nighttime
psx_crab@lemmy.zip 2 weeks ago
Yeah, but that secretly a lazer weapon.
LSNLDN@slrpnk.net 2 weeks ago
I have a theoretical degree in physics
Blackmist@feddit.uk 2 weeks ago
Welcome aboard!
bananabenana@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
You activated ARCHIMEDES?! What the hell are you thinking?!
rayyy@piefed.social 2 weeks ago
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.
Jyek@sh.itjust.works 2 weeks ago
The thing is: transforming into a solid is usually caused by removing energy from matter. The real reason steam is so great is because we put energy into it to make it steam and when the steam turns a turbine, we are converting that chaotic energy into directional, controlled energy.
megopie@beehaw.org 2 weeks ago
I mean, it… does expand when freezing… so maybe?
_stranger_@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
brown567@sh.itjust.works 2 weeks ago
I knew what video it was before I clicked, love that guy XD
starman2112@sh.itjust.works 2 weeks ago
It’s so crazy that we’ve found like six different ways to use rocks to boil water. You’d think there’d just be two or three
ArmchairAce1944@discuss.online 2 weeks ago
It’s going to be boiling water again… Isn’t it?
scala@lemmy.ml 2 weeks ago
Must be the water
lengau@midwest.social 2 weeks ago
I’m gonna need help identifying all of them. So far I have burn them, smush glowing ones together, and reflect radiation with them.
starman2112@sh.itjust.works 2 weeks ago
- Coal. Set it on fire, use fire to boil water
- Geothermal. Go down where the rocks are hot, use hot rocks to boil water.
- Nuclear. Magic rocks get hot all by themselves. Use them to boil water.
- Photovoltaics. Shape rocks into solar panels, use solar panels to power stove to boil water.
- Concentrated solar. Use mirrors to reflect sunlight onto salt (a rock). Boil water with hot salt.
- Put water in a glass tube. Use mercury (a rock) to draw a vacuum. Water boils at room temp under a vacuum.
- Lob a space rock at the planet. Space rock vaporizes everything in a 100 mile radius, including water.
I’m sure we can think of more
veniasilente@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 weeks ago
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.
starman2112@sh.itjust.works 2 weeks ago
Hard to beat spinning a magnet to generate electricity, and it’s hard to beat boiling water to spin a magnet
veniasilente@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 weeks ago
Fair point magnets are basically a superpower by themselves.
anotherspinelessdem@lemmy.ml 2 weeks ago
Photovoltaics
Infamousblt@hexbear.net 2 weeks ago
Actually if you look inside the cells it’s just a tiny little pocket of boiling water
starman2112@sh.itjust.works 2 weeks ago
Guess what I’m boiling with the power from that solar panel
MML@sh.itjust.works 2 weeks ago
I think this may be due to the specific heat of water, no other substance matches it.
veniasilente@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 weeks ago
Fair point it’s been so long since I last took a chemistry course that if I knew anything cool and hidden about water, I’d have trouble resurfacing it. I do know they call it “dihydrogen monoxide” in some reports tho.
Dippy@beehaw.org 2 weeks ago
Wind and photovoltaic have nothing to do with water
apotheotic@beehaw.org 2 weeks ago
Mfw they use wind and photovoltaic energy to pump water to a high place so they can put it through a turbine later
Teppa@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
I’d guess because its all heat energy in the end, so you need something that expands and compresses. The alternative I suppose would be like sound waves, or mechanical energy, or whatever a battery does.
veniasilente@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 weeks ago
That does make sense, but then again, it’s been 2000 years and we can’t find something that boils, expands and compresses better than water? Or is t just because water is commonplace enough in comparisoan?
synapse1278@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
I learned the other day there is a nuclear reactor in development that will use as primary coolant…molten lead.
Still use to boil water then, but pretty freaky still.
eestileib@lemmy.blahaj.zone 2 weeks ago
Water is a fucking insanely awesome material.
Lydia_K@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Good news!
Aquilae@hexbear.net 2 weeks ago
Kolanaki@pawb.social 2 weeks ago
Kickstart this new source of clean energy by burning fossil fuels and spraying CFCs into the air. A hotter planet means water boils easier! 😃
Alcoholicorn@mander.xyz 2 weeks ago
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.
bizarroland@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
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.
herseycokguzelolacak@lemmy.ml 2 weeks ago
It turns out boiling water is a really good idea.
lengau@midwest.social 2 weeks ago
Especially when you make a good cuppa with it.
Bad_Ideas_In_Bulk@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
There are a lot of options, but water works, is cheap as hell, and spills aren’t much of an issue.
Chakravanti@monero.town 2 weeks ago
Nestle & Dupont show up in this hell and Frank Herbert Daemons out their shit discard for dope that 5-MEO-DMT was only alluding to.
Fabrik872@lemmy.blahaj.zone 2 weeks ago
Are we against boiling water only because it is old? Because if that is the only problem and we are ok with reliability and efficiency than i will take old
Skullgrid@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
It’s more that when you look at history and technological progress, and our (millenial’s) own view on technological progress, the current stagnation and the permeation of said stagnation is a pain point. Every time we look at the news, it’s something going fucking wrong, and never delivering on the promise of a better , brighter future.
We saw computers go from 100s of Mhz to 3 ghz ish and just get fucking stuck there. From 16 meg to 64 gigs, and now we can’t buy any ram. We had touch interfaces being able to show you an arbitary interface and instead of innovation, we got swiping through stupid videos. We look through the history we didn’t live through, and see that in the 20th century, we went through flight and rockets to the fucking moon and then nothing. We have a rocket going to the moon with people in it again for the first time since the 70s, and they aren’t even doing anything new, just flying around. We expected there to be fucking bases on MARS by the time we got to the distant year of TWO THOUSAND AND TWENTY SIX.
Even now, when we’re coming to harvesting power from the sun, in a seemingly new way (focusing it with mirrors onto salt) it’s just going to be the same shit, nothing new, no innovation. Just put the hot rock into water, and harvest it through steam power as if it’s the fucking 1800s.
Also, it has a light relation to the evolution inevitably creating crabs once again meme of Carcinisation.
bananabenana@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Great comment!
I’m optimistic in the space of biology and biotechnology though. People are doing actual SciFi shit right now. We’ve got CAR-T tech, CRISPR that’s trivial to deploy, monoclonal antibodies, mRNA tech, microbiome science, DNA sequencing that is mind-blowingly good, large scale computational analysis and machine learning that’s decoding the noise of our genomes, rapid detection of pathogens with a MALDI-TOF, to just name a few.
It’s an insane time in biology right now, and it’s the current frontier along with computer science/ML.
Narauko@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Another way to look at it is comparing water to electricity itself. No one is complaining that going from the electric light bulb to vacuum tube logic gates to semiconducter logic gates to q-bit logic gates is just “using physics to direct electrons again”.
Boiling water is just the layer 1 physical transport, all the cool stuff is happening at layers 2-7. The real mind blowing breakthrough would be if they finally did something to fix layer 8, but I ain’t holding my breath.
belated_frog_pants@beehaw.org 2 weeks ago
Its more a commentary that most “new electricity source!!! Amazing!” Is a heat source thats boiling water to turbines which isnt a new method, its a new source of heat. So more a complaint about sensational headlines about electricity
einfach_orangensaft@sh.itjust.works 2 weeks ago
fun fact, u can also boil opposed spy satelites with that setup
Agent641@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
I doubt it, calibrating a focal point to a 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, it even that would be impractical.
wabasso@lemmy.ca 2 weeks ago
Can you elaborate?
Fedizen@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
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.
Collatz_problem@hexbear.net 2 weeks ago
USSR also built an experimental power plant of this type. Sadly, it was closed and disassembled after the breakup of the Soviet Union.
Carl@hexbear.net 2 weeks ago
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.
nexguy@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
It’s just used to scroll social media again isn’t it?
Alcoholicorn@mander.xyz 2 weeks ago
Wot if instead of boiling water, we boiled CO2, and instead of boiling CO2, we kept it at high pressure so that it never quite reached boiling or condensation?
gandalf_der_12te@discuss.tchncs.de 2 weeks ago
Physicists just looove a hot shower
snugglesthefalse@sh.itjust.works 2 weeks ago
Well molten salt batteries are a thing, I’m presuming this is to buffer the output of the solar and that the losses were deemed acceptable given the renewable nature of this.
Cantaloupe@lemmy.fedioasis.cc 2 weeks ago
Turbine go brr
psoul@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Supercritical CO2 is entering the chat
Napster153@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
MA! NEW ACE COMBAT BOSS JUST DROPPED!!
Diplomjodler3@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
How else are you going to make your tea?
infinitesunrise@slrpnk.net 2 weeks ago
They have (had?) one of these outside of Vegas. Bright as fuck, you could see it dozens of miles away when flying in on a plane, but couldn’t look directly at it.
Lushed_Lungfish@lemmy.ca 2 weeks ago
Meh, it works.
MonkderVierte@lemmy.zip 2 weeks ago
It would also be ideal for high-efficiency, high-temperature hydrogen production.
callouscomic@lemmy.zip 2 weeks ago
The movie Sahara did it.
Tronn4@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Boiled water gang
Mwa@thelemmy.club 2 weeks ago
if its just water boiling in a pot,can you just put a Turbine above the pot and use the steam to spin the Turbine?
dreadbeef@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 weeks ago
I mean, is there a more efficient way to take raw energy and spin a turbine with it?
SnarkoPolo@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
What’s the worst that could happen?
Philharmonic3@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Sahara?
AnarchoEngineer@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 weeks ago
ACTUALLY ITS BOILING SODIUM!!… ~which then gets used to boil water~^superscript^
Akh@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
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
BC_viper@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Image
Always has been.
LurkingLuddite@piefed.social 2 weeks ago
Solar panel projects, which many have outstripped this and other projects in power limitations, do not boil water to generate electricity.
wewbull@feddit.uk 2 weeks ago
Well there hydro power, where we just skip the boiling part and have water turn turbines.
Neptr@lemmy.blahaj.zone 2 weeks ago
Supercritical CO2 turbine be like: whatup
psx_crab@lemmy.zip 2 weeks ago
Yeah but, really all these are just turbinepunk because in the end we’re pushing the turbine either by using steam or natural wind.
gravitas_deficiency@sh.itjust.works 2 weeks ago
Hey man I just want warm noodles
backalleycoyote@lemmy.today 2 weeks ago
This is the revelation my mustache has been waiting for.