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Couldn’t you just put some solar panels next to it? I mean, the sun is basically just a massive fusion reactor (just very far away and kind of inefficient), right? Imagine we built our own sun, right here on earth, that would make solar panels a lot more effective, no?
My guess is: it’s more efficient to convert boiling water movement to electricity than to convert photons emission to electricity.
Stars are a lot cooler then fusion reactors.
It’s in their outer layers that they produce a shit ton of photons.
Fusion reactors are way hotter (like 100m Celsius) and although they make photons most are very high energy (think gamma, xrays etc).
So what would be emitted as visible light would never be enough to generate enough power via pvc to pay back the cost of generating the fusion reaction in the first place much less the cost of building the plant.
Also pvc is like at best 22%~ efficient. You’re losing a lot compared to say steam powered generators which, using ultra super critical hot steam made by a fusion reactor could maybe hit 60% (I believe that is high as you can go).
Asianonmetry has a great lecture on steam powered generators
Yep! And fun fact, online encryption relies on basically exactly this technology (radioactive decay, not fusion, but hey it’s close enough if you squint). Radiophotovoltaic batteries provide uninterrupted current, which is used to ensure that encryption keys (stored in highly volatile memory for security) are not lost due to a brief power flicker.
We can’t make it so large that its own gravity will contain the reaction mass, so it has to be kept inside a very strong magnetic field created by huge magnets. You can’t put solar panels inside the reaction chamber, they would get destroyed.
I fell like it should be possible to make solar panels that don’t contain iron, nickel, or cobalt.
Um, it’s the heat, pressure, and ionizing radiation of the fusion reaction that would destroy the panels.
All depends on the frequency of the radiation it is giving off and the intensity I guess. Probably not the same as what we get from the sun, so I’m guessing solar panels aren’t suitable
There’s also Direct Energy Conversion, Radiophotovoltaics and Radioisotope Thermoelectric Generators, but none of those are practical for large scales (and only DEC works with fusion, hypothetically)
except for solar and wind, i guess. also the thingy where you catch electrons directly from nuclear decay.
Seebeck generators
There are also some chemical modes of electricity generation (Alkalai batteries, etc). Also using flowing water to move Turbines like dams.
But then the meme isn’t as fun here, and those are such a small minority of how we generate powers.
Even then all of them but solar are just spinning a wheel.
And even then some solar works by boiling salt… Or water.
spinning a wheel.
So hamster power?
You could maybe catch lightning and store it. That’s not boiling water … what’s that? It is boiling water?
I wouldn’t be surprised, it it turns out, when the most efficient way to turn lightning into electricity, was to redirect it into a boiler, instead of harvesting it directly
boring
all my homies boil water
Yeah, water is fuckin’ sick. Thermohydraulics is awesome.
If phase changes weren’t so badass we would be so fucked, lol.
We never left steam engines really.
To me, and apparently the Greeks!
It is not known whether the aeolipile was put to any practical use in ancient times, and if it was seen as a pragmatic device, a whimsical novelty, an object of reverence, or some other thing.
Don’t sell steam power short or water for drinking.
Fusion is still five years off, right?
N+5 years off, where n is the current year. We’ll get there one day!
It’s going to be a hell of a lot faster with all those oil wells burning
IIRC, most of the people that actually work at ITER don’t expect to live to see commercial fusion.
We’ve achieved controlled ignition several times, but there’s a lot of steps still between that and delivering fusion power to your local grid, and I don’t think I would trust anyone to give a concrete timeline.
I really thought Polywell Fusion would be the trick, but Australians (and probably the US DoD) have good evidence it doesn’t “scale” in a way that will give a energy-positive/fuel-negative cycle. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polywell#University_of_Sydney_experiments
Finally a challenger has emerged
Let’s separate CO2 from atmosphere and use it to run such generators. Win win. But don’t ask physics about this top much
Actually, I remember that on iceland they were injecting CO2 into rock, and it was shipped to them from … Swicerland, I think, in shipping tanks. It was captured from concrete manufacturing plants, which apparently produce a ton if it. So there you go - cheap CO2 is not a problem
I doubt the amount used in what I presume is a closed system like this will be significant on a atmosphere level, but it could certainly be the source. If nothing else would make a great headline.
Was just going to say sprcritc02 ftwbaby
Wow, that’s the first time I’ve seen the source of the bald meme
That’s just the effect of fusion. It regrows hair.
Make alternator spin. Is only way.
I refuse to believe this.
You’re telling me that Humanity is able to understand what goes on at the heart of stars, and is on the brink of being able to harness that power (“Soon TM”), and the best we can come up with is a big tea kettle? I’m not buying it.
There’s got to be a better way of capturing all that energy - like, solar panels but for other types of radiation? Or if that’s not possible because wavelengths or something , maybe make something glow and use normal panels? Or like, can’t we take a particle accelerator and flip it around and pull energy from the particles that go zooming?
I’m sure there’s a reason why all of that is hard, but surely not impossible?
You identified the solution. Use a solar panel and let the reactor in the center of our system do the work. Add a batteries to make up for being blocked. Today, solar AND batteries are cheaper than fission reactors. Fusion has promise, but why over invest in a maybe when you can use the technology we have today? Is it because It has an end game where you don’t infinity extract resources? Who would want that?
We’ve gotten really, really good at extracting energy from steam, steam turbines can be incredibly efficient, I can’t recall exact figures but Wikipedia cites 90% as the top end.
True, but that’s just one part of the process, and it’s not comparing to the initial energy in the source fuel.
If nothing else, there’s an absolute efficiency limit from Carnot’s theorem, but in reality it’s much lower, even for the most modern and efficient gas plants, the limit seems to be ~60%, and for nuclear or coal, it’s even lower at around 30-40%.
I believe there is a generator with functional prototypes in the US and China that uses supercritical CO2? I mean its basically a steam engine but using a different medium and potentially even more efficient.
The majority of the energy released will be heat, relatively few high energy photons are released so ‘solar’ isn’t a viable option and your suggestion about a particle accelerator just doesn’t make any sense.
Boiling water is literally the best way to capture the energy released.
I’m not disputing what the current gold standard is, I’m looking for theoretical possibilities.
When you say heat, in fusion, most of the energy would be a neutron moving really fast, right? It sucks that it doesn’t have a charge because then it would be really easy, but there’s options here if we get creative.
Maybe there’s some sort of material yet to be invented that can be slapped by a neutron and “deformed” in a way that causes electrons to shift/make holes and exploit that to make electricity.
And that free neutron will eventually decay into a proton and electron, and those have a charge, so if we keep them going around a loop until that happens perhaps we could harness it.
And to be clear, it’s harnessing the energy released by state changes in materials.
Water is just the most abundant, cleanest, and most effective material to state change and harness.
We live in a steampunk timeline, everything must boil water.
If they make an artificial sun inside a donut why don’t they line the donut with solar panels? Are they stupid?
But you’d have to allow the sun to leak out of the donut, and I’m not too sure that sun-leaking donuts are OSHA approved.
donuts?
Real answer: The sheer amount of neutron radiation thrown off by fusion would mechanically erode the panels. This is why the Lockheed Martin fusion reactor they claimed to have built is complete BS - their design ignored the requirement to shield their superconductors from the neutron radiation, allowing them to be placed far closer to the reaction (and thus vastly lower the power requirements). While it could have theoretically worked briefly, it would have eaten itself into radioactive dust astoundingly quickly.
It melts salt, isn’t it?
If you mean molten salt reactors, guess what they do with the molten salt to make electricity…
…they found a clever way to induce a current using temperature differentials between the molten salt and some sort of coolant mass?
and that coolant mass’ name?
I call it Bytejunkium, but I don’t think it catched on.
I bet it looks like a bunch of blue balls
Oh I love this comment. Such a not-leading question!
🤭🤫yess
