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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.
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.
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 stations, including cooling towers etc, because water is abundant on earth so it’s cheaper to just dump it back into the atmosphere; 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. And it probably will need to be a closed system in the future in space where water will be incredibly precious.
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. Water is also easy to use as storage, if the need of consumption requires buffering.
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.
The same principal has been tried with crypto mining to reduce waste / cost.
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 with 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.
Imagine doing something like having a GPU based baseboard heater that folds proteins whenever it’s on, where it doesn’t become completely obsolete in a couple years. If the chips were cheap enough it’d be way better than just doing heat.
Edit: Taking the idea further… imagine if governments mandated reuse of the heat generated by data centers instead of piping it outside? You want to build a data center here? Build a public pool and heat the building / water with your excess heat. Then that commercial zone also gets a fitness center for anyone nearby.
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.
Steam had several technical and power limitations. It was dropped very quickly when electrification was an option.
Hydrohomies!
We need this on lemmy
We have it already! ^^ <3
“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.”
Throwing water into a star wouldn’t get you steam, it’d just fuel the star XD
You gotta seal the planet in a heat-safe bag, and make sure to not drop it out of orbit, or you’ll lose the water, as you say.
Nah. You’ll probably want several shells operating above any sane temperature for steam. You don’t want to lose that extremely high temperature by just heating water to 600 °C or so.
It’s always been about finding new ways to spin a turbine
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.
Well, hydro is just spinning water again, wind is spinning air. Solar is stealing electrons from the sun (i think?) So that’s cool
Well, the sun is sending them to us, so it’s not really stealing!
I promise I’ll return them when I’m done with them.
stealing
reappropriating :D
Getting electronics knocked around by photons.
Domestic Appliance Violence
Agree, the quantum-chem of it is amazing… Then again, solar has an efficiency of ~30% compared to the 90% for spinning steam
I don’t think it makes sense to compare those efficiencies, as one is for converting heat to electricity, while the other is for converting sunlight. If you use sunlight to heat water and then use that for a steam turbine, the efficiency is similar to a photovoltaic panel. The efficiency numbers are still useful, but only when they refer to the same starting point for the conversion (e.g. only comparing things that turn heat into electricity).
You are right it doesnt really makes sense to compare them that way, it was just what the initial comment was doing. Nuclear fission is in itself only like 30% efficient. There are of course tons of metrics to compare these things, I personally like space-time efficiency or CO2/MWh.
Yeah, it’s comparing apples to crabs. It’s only looking at the very final stage and ignoring the efficiencies of the fuel, etc.
If you wanted to make the comparison more fair (and also show how bad it is), a coal power plant maybe has an efficiency of 35%. You can calculate that by dividing the thermal energy in by the electric energy out. You feed in enough coal to generate 8MW of heat, which generates 2.8MW of electricity, so 2.8/8 = 0.35. By contrast, a photovoltaic power plant generates say 2kW of electricity with 0 fuel, so it has an efficiency of ∞%.
But it’s all profit baby! Let something else figure out cousin, put 0% effort in and collect the rewards!
but crucially no moving parts. very little maintenance, especially compared to anything steam driven.
I am a big solar fan, but the moving part inertia thing is actually great for stabilizing the grid.
They pump water through it. The water gives energy, all our energy is hydrogen baby
You can transfer gas to electricity without boiling water. But it is much more efficient to combine it with boiling water
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.
note that i distinguish these categories by their core essence, such as whether they’re using changes in magnetic flux (like a mechanical generator) or transferring 1 photon on each electron (like solar panels), instead of looking at what source type of energy they transform.
because there’s many ways to transform e.g. light energy into electricity. you could also heat water with the sunlight and then drive a steam engine with it. but that’s not what i care about. i care about the fundamental connection between different types of energy, and how they can be directly transformed to one another.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioisotope_thermoelectric_generator
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betavoltaic_device
We use steam because it is very efficient and lowest cost to maintain.
There are actually versions of fusion reactors that use the magnetic fields generated by the plasma in order to make electricity directly.
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: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_bDXXWQxK38
use cherenkov radiation to power photovoltaic array.
Yeah but photovoltaic has a yield of less than 50% even for the best panels. Lots of waste there, compared to steam.
What is the peak efficiency of steam turbines?
Supercritical steam is nothing to fuck with. Even old school sub critical steam will happily kill you as if it were fire instead of water.
Edit
Utility steam turbines operate with inlet steam pressures up to 3500 psig and exhaust at vacuum conditions as low as 2 psia
Damn
Wasn’t there one concept too with catching neutrons directly to …generate heat, ah right.
Living somewhere that makes 90+% of its electricity from hydro, I am slightly confused.
Most modern means of electricity production involve creating heat in some way, then using that heat to boil water, creating steam. That steam is then used to turn a turbine, which generates electricity.
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?
Salt is absolutely terrible for any equipment involved in power generation. You’re better off with a power plant and a separate desalination plant than trying to use one for both
But you’re right, cheap energy will help immensely with this
Say that too molten salt reactors! /s
Haha true that, though if I’m not mistaken a large part of the engineering of molten salt reactors is dealing with the salt…man I want the cool tech to be rolled out
In other words, boil water yet again?
Why is that a problem, exactly?
Because it’s not as cool as directly harvest the energy itself like in scifi.
geothermal is boiling water too, and it’s pretty neat
I’ve been thinking that for a while. Issue is that it’s risky, if you fuck up there’s a pretty high chance that there are going to be a lot of houses with cracks in their walls (assuming you’re doing it in a relatively densely populated area that doesn’t normally see earthquakes).
You mean, like fracking (for oil power) minus the poisoning groundwater part?
We could just not use any power source that severely damages our environment. Solar and wind don’t have these issues to this extend, even if you include the necessary storage capacity (batteries, hydroelectric reservoirs) and include the resource use for building them (though that resource use is still a pretty big issue).
Though it’s not impossible to use geothermal energy without severely damaging the environment, you just need either a large amount of unsettled land (like Iceland) or you need to be really, really careful and limit the kinds of things you do - using geothermal energy for district heating apparently is a lot less likely to create earthquakes than what Iceland is doing.
Yes, geothermal heating is common here (switzerland). Power gen. less so.
Any powerplant will usually done in a pretty isolated area for safety reason, so i’d assume the chance of it happen is very, very slim. If location isn’t permitted it’s probably shouldn’t be build, especially for the type that need to dig very deep to access the heat, so solar panel on roof is probably the best way for any power generation that is placed close or in the populated area.
Here in Germany, that hasn’t been true at all so far. For starters, there aren’t any “pretty isolated areas” in the first place, since the entire country is pretty densely settled compared to e.g. Iceland. There are still some ongoing projects, though, IIRC they are usually being done for district heating, which has to be near populated areas per definition. I think these types of projects aren’t as likely to create earthquakes as the ones for electricity in Iceland, though.
I remember seeing a documentary about a village in Germany, where many houses were damaged by geothermal plants, caused by water entering layers where it usually didn’t reach and the material there taking in water and expanding. So it probably depends a lot on the local geology and also on the depth. I sadly don’t remember how deep the one in the documentary was.
I know a few people that got geothermal heating installed for their homes (in Germany), which goes a lot less deep than something intended for whole cities or districts. The one at my friend’s home is 50m deep, and it looks like anything less than 400m is considered “near surface”
Huh, interesting. I checked my country for this and it seems here we too have a coal plant right next to housing area, but it seems like the housing is the one creep toward the coal plant, not the other way around.
But then i’m not sure what sort of error will cause a quake and ruin houses. Is there any case happen to past construction?
I don’t think a coal plant would cause earthquakes.
From @[email protected]’s comment:
village in Germany, where many houses were damaged by geothermal plants, caused by water entering layers where it usually didn’t reach and the material there taking in water and expanding
It’s specific to geothermal
assuming you’re doing it in a relatively densely populated area that doesn’t normally see earthquakes
dropping the latter assumption?
What do you mean?
Assume it’s an area with frequent earthquakes
But that’s usually not true. You can either just not do geothermal in areas that aren’t prone to natural earthquakes, force every homeowner to make their home earthquake-proof (which is extremely expensive, probably a lot more than just building batteries for solar+wind) or suck it up when they get damaged, or the owners of the geothermal plant have to pay for any damages (unlikey).
Like solar panels converting photons to electrons?
Like solar thermal powerplant or molten salt reactor, LAME.
That’s why solarpunk is the coolest.
Honey, go toss another plutonium pellet in the house slot, please.
Let me guess, you need to boil some water?
It’s not really a problem, it’s just funny that so many forms of power generation we have are just boiling water to make steam that spins turbines.
It only feels odd because that is genuinely an incredibly effective means of generation, and we found it very early on because steam is so fundamental. Nothing wrong with sticking to the best method ever discovered.
and we found it very early on
just FYI, the electrochemical battery was invented in 1800, while electromechanical generator was invented in around 1866.
Eh, we’re still moving electrons around in wires like Faraday did in the 1800s!
Solar concentration is boiling some other liquid, so there’s some variance 😅
I blame the constant stream of bullshit, clickbait “science” headlines that media and internet has subjected an entire generation to, leading to the same effect as it’s had on politics, which is the average person tunes out completely and nobody knows what’s “standard” and normal anymore, and doesn’t really care either.
People with no actual experience in electrical generation on large scale.
you have a better plan?
Yeah; somehow converting the plasma directly into electricity at a 1:1 ratio using… Uh… Dilithium or something.
I hate to break this to you, but chemically, dilithium is just a highly complex steam.
What if we add some nutrinos? And then reverse the polarity? And maybe some antimatter?
Wait, was dilithium just the media Star Trek used to go from reacting matter with antimatter, producing heat, causing the dilithium steam to expand, spinning a magnet inside a coil somewhere behind one of those access panels? Was antimatter just fancy futuristic coal powering the Enterprise’s steam engine!?
Edit: phew No, it’s not just a fancy space steam engine. It is pure fantasy; the dilithium crystal matix regulates antimatter (impossible for any matter to do so) and interacts with subspace (no evidence such a thing even exists), but it’s not spinning any magnets.
Hold up, I think you’re onto something.
There are episodes of the warp core exploding in slow mo. It’s just huge amounts of steam!
Not a better plan but just a curiosity as a physicist enthusiast.
Regarding nuclear fission and nuclear waste (and ignoring the big elephant in the room that are nuclear weapons)…
What are the technical difficulties to turn the radiation emitted by nuclear waste into electricity?
I mean, if the nuclear waste is still radiating, it has stored energy that is radiated as photons, right?
Then, we have the photo-electric effect which turns photons into moving electrons as long as the frequency surpasses a minimum threshold.
Given that the radiation of nuclear waste has frequency way higher than UV, why can’t it be used to feed a photoelectric generator?
Also, we have tons of nuclear waste, so the argument that a single rod doesn’t generate enough radiation seems kinda bogus since we could just store the nuclear waste into a safer recipient that turns the harmful rays directly into electricity and we have a shit-ton of them stored in thick lead or concrete barrels just so this radiation don’t harm the surroundings.
.
It is a genuine question that I had, but never had enough physics class to understand where this logic falls apart.
Because, if it were feasible and “cheap”, I bet that the US would already be doing it and having access to “free energy” (not really, but a long-standing generator that doubles as removing nuclear waste from the ambient).
Given that the radiation of nuclear waste has frequency way higher than UV, why can’t it be used to feed a photoelectric generator?
You’re probably using one of these right now (albeit indirectly)! They’re called Photovoltaic nuclear batteries and they’re critical to modern encryption. They ensure that encryption keys, which are stored in highly volatile memory (memory where if power is ever lost the contents are immediately erased), never lose power unless the memory modules are physically disconnected.
The reason they’re not used more extensively is that they just don’t produce very much power - the high-energy electromagnetic radiations are very difficult to harness constructively (things like gamma and X-rays) and as a result we have to do some weird physics stuff to convert them. PVN batteries convert particle radiation, beta radiation from tritium decay specifically, into usable photons via a thin coating of phosphorus on the glass, instead of them being captured directly.
(this is a wild oversimplification just to be clear)
watched something on nuclear waste. produces some heat just sitting there. should be usable energy there. think it emits neutrons and electrons. ‘ionizing’ radiation. don’t know if there is a way to generate electricity directly but seems more energetic than just photons.
These types of energy generating current from radioactive decay exist and are used to power spacecraft for years. Not very efficient and the cost/benefit ratio is really only justified on space exploration budgets.
Short answer to why aren’t we doing X is always, always, cost.
I would swear I saw Tom Scott interview one lab that was planning on building a fusion generator that worked like a diesel engine. Like, the fusion reaction drives a piston.
The pistons drive the fusion, or so they think… General Fusion.
I want it to work like a hit and miss engine. Big ol flywheel, the exhaust valve is held open until the RPM dips low enough then you get a power stroke, just a nice controlled fusion event that releases a whackton of energy, bring the RPM up a bit…
Like the TARDIS Time Rotor, just a pleasant up and down stroking motion as Billie Piper trips and falls onto you…
Just get Maxwell’s demon to separate the plasma into positive and negative charges, effectively creating a capacitor, then discharge it directly over some HVDC lines!
