Yeah about that.
Those are termosolar powerplant, they use the sun to boil water and spin a turbine.
Why do I have an overwhelming urge to climb that
You know if you’re a moth, you can just fly up there.
No brother!
BRotHeR i cRaVe foR tHe ForBiDDen liGhT
You played too many Ubisoft games.
Are you perhaps living in a place where it snows or something
Sam McGee just wants to do free climbing
Um…no.
Sam McGee just wants to be warm
Yeah that was the joke
Its even more metal they heat salt that heats water to spin the turbine. This keeps the power generation well after sun down.
Better solar power extractor.
If you think about it coal fired power plants are also solar powered 🤔
True, just that an intermediate step(of many steps) is to continually destroy the atmosphere.
It’s not like we need it to breath anyways. We’ll just pay corporations for oxygen masks and “Atmo-tanks” to breath. We have commodify everything because Capitalism requires it.
C’mon Cohegan, give dees peepul aihhhhhh
Only that sun fell on plants millions of years ago. We really don’t want that million year old carbon dioxide in the atmosphere alongside the recent stuff
Very true, the conclusion I’m drawing is that solar power is actively harming the environment and causing climate change. No new solar!
Fine to think of it, it’s also renewable!
AFAIR you can’t get new coal/oil because in the meantime there are fungi in the ground that would process the dead plants/alge/whatever was pressed to make the hydrocarbons. but i can’t find the source of that info, so grain of salt
Most coal comes from the carbonipherous period, a period in which plants evolved wood but
microbesfunghi (shutout to Lyrl’s below comment) still hadn’t evolved wood-eating.You can get new coal in marshes because I think the process to eat wood requires oxygen, and flooded areas don’t allow for wood to decompose totally. That’s why they can pull out wooden ships from 500 years ago from the bottom of the ocean in relatively good condition!
That it took 400 million years for one fungus to evolve wood eating is wild to me. And no other microbe has ever evolved that ability: my understanding is all wood decay fungal species today evolved from one shared ancester.
You’re likely right, my background is physics, I’ll quote you on the comment above!
Stupid science and its “biology” ane “evolutionary timelines” always trying to ruin my fun…
Are you referring to lignen developing before there was a bilogical process to break it down?
do you not know how those work?
the sun shines on the side angled upwards and heats it up. everybody knows hot air rises, so this raises the blade, creating the spinning motion.
it’s basic, really. third grade stuff.
I really love how it’s almost that simple.
the sun shines on the
side angled upwardsplanet and heats it up. everybody knows hot air rises,so this raisescreating winds that drive the blade, creating the spinning motion.Omg every body knows wind is created when god sighs at the collective sin of the world.
Some people so dumb.
the great orc father mungnog’s farts propel the wind, all know this.
I declare holy war!
The sun heats the planet unevenly, this causes wind. Wind is solar
Although they’re falling out of use these days, both because they’re not very environmentally friendly on account of being instant bird death-rays, and also because regular solar panels are cheap enough that it’s not worth it to make a big thermosolar plant.
Habitat destruction, air pollution, and pesticides are unfathomably worse for birds.
And I’m not sure how much alive things are in the Atacama (except when there is a blooming desert fenomenon.
Idk, my country just inaugurated a gigantic one of these.
Also, fotovoltaic pannels decay with time and have to be replaced, 15 years I think? Their manufacturing isn’t also the greenest thing on earth.
You build one of these, and you can run it for a long long time.
15 years I think
This number gets lower every time I see it.
First, manufacturers typically guarantee their panels for 25 to 30 years.
Second, while we can extrapolate from existing data and perform accelerated aging tests, we’re actually not completely sure how long PV panels last in the real world because the oldest ones from 1987 are still going.
fotovoltaic pannels decay with time and have to be replaced, 15 years I think?
much longer: https://www.slashgear.com/1989112/solar-panel-lifespan-longer-new-study/
The usual warranty period is 20 years generating 80% of the nameplate generating Watts
They keep generating reasonable amounts of power 50 or 100 years later, though they tend to get overtaken by new technology in 10 to 20 years, and since they pay for themselves in about 4 years in my area they get replaced while still working well
I think we export our obsolete panels to developing nations
Lies! Well the thermal plant is also fine but photovoltaics are really, really good.
I wonder if it could be worth it to make one of those on other planets/the Moon one day. No birds to worry about there.
Solar panels are still cheaper and easier. Most spaceships and probes rely on them.
Yea, I should have guessed as much.
Not a lot of atmosphere on the moon.
Transmitting heat across distances in effectively a vacuum doesn’t work too well.
Just look a the size of the radiators the ISS has to have, and they’re not even sending heat anywhere in particular, that’s just getting it off station
You’re getting thermal radiation and convection confused. The ISS has giant radiators because it’s a right pain in the ass to turn heat into thermal radiation, and it cannot rely on convection to cool things like you can here on earth. Turning thermal radiation into heat on the other hand is pretty trivial. Just don’t reflect it and it’ll turn into heat. These things aren’t transporting heat across distances. They are transporting thermal radiation across distances. That works as well in a vacuum – if not better – as it does on earth.
If thermal radiation doesn’t work in a vacuum, how is the sun heating anything up?
I stand corrected
Or in the Atacama, the Desertiest desert on earth!
Where the gigantic Cerro Dominador Termosolar Power Plant opened a couple years ago.
The mirrors on Earth don’t transfer the energy using the air between the mirror and the collector, they just bounce the spicy photons which can travel even better in a vacuum.
Ahkshually, those tend to boil salt…which is later used to boil water.
That technology is a relic of the past. Solar panels are cheap and efficient now. Just use solar panels.
And much easier to operate and troubleshoot.
That’s what they want you to think. I bet it also powers a secret orbital space laser. I should know, a man with a theoretical degree in physics told me.
Removed by mod
In Canada (2023), renewables make up 66% and nuclear 13% (about 80% together). That’s also pretty good.
yeah some countries have that, like sweden and austria. the reason is because they’re very mountaineous areas, so there’s a lot of water power to harvest. in germany, which is really flat, that would have been impossible with water alone.
fully self sustaining power wise
Damn, imagine that.
Talk about national security.
only 3.4 M people, little industry
I dont know about this topic spessifically, but the excuses of “but they are rich”/“they have a small population”/“they’re a small country” when used against good stuff like this not existing somewhere else almost always seems to be that… Dumb excuses.
Their education system is awesome? Oh well they’re only a handful of people.
They have low car usage and walkable/bikeable cities? Oh well their land is just 40,000 km².
They have good social services? Well they’re a really rich country.
Solar panels are all nice and stuft, but what about some boiled water?
Boil water? What am I, a chemist?
A cook?
Pasta bitches!!
china already have a supercritical carbon dioxide system integrated into a functioning powergrid and operating commercially. The system exploits an exotic phase of co2 which expands to fill a volume like gas, but moves frictionlessly through tubes as a liquid. There are concerns about lifespan because of how caustic the system is, but apparently some new materials are being trialled which negate this.
Heat pumps are the next evolution of the “it’s just steam again isn’t it?” meme.
They trying to make them with work with either memory alloys or with magnetic materials.
Same principle have something can go hot and cold based on some external control. But they will be done on solid materials not fluids.
Link with description for those who are unaware of this like me
This is mainly integrated AFAIK in industrial processes with high amounts of low entropy heat available (i.e. big volumes of not-that-hot liquids), and it allows for electric production from said heat with unprecedented efficiency. Cool shit
Now we just need solar boilers.
To boil water.
Driving by the one in California was always a trip. You could see the lines of sunlight being reflected from the mirrors in the air; it was so bright.
turns out we sort of have that. only it does not boil water, but heats the air so liquid hydrocarbons come out of it https://www.research-collection.ethz.ch/server/api/core/bitstreams/186f37f3-be00-415e-8bbb-439b66ee2b75/content
I’m pretty sure we have actual solar water heaters too tbh
All it takes is a water pipe painted black zigzagging inside a box which is black inside and has the sun facing side replaced by glass.
You can get hot water from something like that even in Winter.
you can get>200F from a passive solar air heater made of soda cans on a 30F day.
https://www.instructables.com/Aluminum-Can-Solar-Heater/
we do. they are about the size of a solar panel, look similar and are on some roofs of houses in my area. the ones i’m refering to are not for boiling water, just for preheating so need less energy when it goes back into the [ger: heizungskreislauf]. all the ones i know are older then the current PV panel boom. fun fact, there are even concepts (and implentation, but i can’t find it) for vacuum glas tubes that have a parabolic mirror around a black painted copper pipe, which should be able to generate ~400 °C “process heat”. but they are not wide spread, cause PV is so much cheaper now
Harrumph
Still don’t understand how this could possibly generate energy.
the power plant is in space and beams energy to the dish.
Right, but like… whatever you’re doing in space is going to be more cost effective to do on earth. Not to mention the insane amount of energy lost to the atmosphere
Energy loss for wireless energy transmission is actually surprisingly low. Here is an example of 80% efficiency over 1 kilometer: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/1123672
Energy loss for wireless energy transition is actually surprisingly low.
…
Unless you really need to optimise for land use. An arbitrarily large solar array in space could transmit to a fairly small collector in the surface.
As for losing power to atmospheric attenuation, high frequency microwaves will pass right through most everything that would scatter visible light. Clouds, dust, etc wouldn’t really impede it.
I won’t say it’s not a silly idea, because it is. It’s fun to think about though.
You could also have a constellation of satellites with area greater than the surface of the earth. It’s not that silly of an idea.
Big solar panel
musk wants datacenters in space. which makes sense, 24/7 sunlight and no transmission of power is grand; but I do wonder about the shielding and moving the data back and forth.
It’s nonsense, for cooling reasons alone
yeah had a whole convo with a neighbor about how much cooling tech the ISS depends on.
at least it won’t need separate water/ammonia loop setup like the ISS. radiators are pretty figured out. I just can’t see how they make it economical with all the launch and space logistics - and don’t get me wrong spacex can deliver to orbit - but can they make it profitable?
also, where’s the grunt for this supposed AI cloud gonna come from? what chips can survive for 1000s of hours of compute in that environment? and from what he’s said (24/7 sunlight) are they thinking lagrange points or what? also xmit/receive of massive amounts of data would need to be crucial to making it work and we got none of that infrastructure…
all leads me to think his ketamine is showing.
yeah but imagine you can put the plant and all the pollution on an asteroid or something.
That is the wrong sort of receiving antenna for more than milliwatts of energy beamed from space
It basically doesn’t work out.
Theoretically you could have 2500 square meters of solar arrays above the weather beaming the power down to a dish with only a 500 square meter footprint.
But you’d still have to deal with weather with some kind of a storage solution. And 2500 square meters of area in space seems more expensive to claim than just 500 square meters of area on land, in pretty much any scenario.
People are essentially internal combustion engines that burn food. Trying to capture that energy in ways that increases the load on us just causes us to need more calories. That’s counter productive as you could just burn said food itself to get energy, and agriculture is an energy and environmentally intensive industry to begin with.
The original idea was the machines using humans as a connected neural network. I don’t think it would change much about the plot of the movies if they’re used for energy or brain power, so it’s easy to change it for your own head canon at least 🙂
As the other person already said, not totally relevant to the discussion at hand, but I do find that bit of trivia fascinating. The processing power version makes so much more sense logically, but it was put to the wayside by production executives because they thought the average movie-goer wouldn’t get it, since computing was still somewhat niche at the time.
We aren’t actually talking about the matrix here
On the other hand, clothes that would help me lose weight and charge my phone at the same time sound pretty cool. Just need to install Pokemon Go and I’ll be fit in no time.
Don’t worry, you’ll just eat more to compensate lol
so I get to enjoy more pizza?
Yes.
ACKSHUALLY we’re going to put special solar panels inside the reactor.
And then use the solar panels to power a water boiler.
D’oh!!!
Yeah, I want a pot of tea
It is artificial sun basically, so…
Harness the power of the sun, but indoors!
I think thats the plan right? Steam turbines i mean…
Yes, because electricity is just things spinning, and steam is the easiest way to make things spin.
All energy sources have trade offs.
Solar panels take a lot of space and shadows ecosystems reliant on sun light. Wind turbines kill birds and are noisy. Dams remove water sources from ecosystems and communities reliant on them. Fusion/nuclear/fission pose security risks. Oil/coal power puts CO2 and pollutants into the air.
The last one has global consequences and the first 4 only have local consequences that depend on circumstances.
Edit: hey everyone, the point of this comment was not to shit on renewables or to paint them as equal to non renewables. I admit that the arguments I made are not the best. They didn’t come from thorough analysis, but it also wasn’t the point. The point is just that there is a case for fusion/fission too. One doesn’t have to exclude the other. Many renewables are time sensitive and depend on the environment. They are great and absolutely should we invest in it! I just don’t subscribe to the idea that we should shoot down fusion/fission.
The amount of birds that actually get killed by wind turbines has always been dubious at best. And having been next to a wind turbine, they really aren’t that noisy.
In the early days of electricity, people complained they got headaches.
I’m not saying they are bad or not preferred. I’m just saying there are cases for fusion/fission sometimes.
yep. it’s called “deep space” and “half the way to the ord cloud”
Wind turbines kill birds and are noisy.
Technology Connections made a video specifically for you. https://youtu.be/KtQ9nt2ZeGM
Solar panels providing shade to grazing animals and crops is a mutual win, not the loss you make it out to be. Search for “the trampolining effect”
Thanks for sharing!
Fields with solar panels (10-40% shadowing) actually have up to 20% more yield here, since summers get too hot for 1 - 2 months. Swiss, not far south.
Also, place them on roofs!
That’s my point. The social benefit of renewables are environmentally and temporally differentiating. It doesn’t mean we shouldn’t invest in them! We definitely should, and likely more than we do. But all I’m saying if you were to calculate the environmental and societal long run costs, I believe there must be places and situations where fission/fusion is preferred sometimes.
I believe there must be places and situations where fission/fusion is preferred sometimes.
Heavy industry. Metal casting, metal purification from ore, rockwool insulation, cement, glass works, all use huge energy.
Fusion(…) pose security risks
Wait, what kind? Doesn’t the reaction just fizzle out and become safely dormant if anything wrong happens?
I’m thinking more in terms of warfare
how so?
The technology to use fusion as a bomb already exists. and has 0 to do with how the reactors work
For example when Russia invaded Ukraine and they attacked Chernobyl. Maybe it’s not founded in real risk. But I imagine it could be a security threat for someone to bomb a nuclear facility.
To alleviate your concerns - unlike fission, in a fusion reactor the only radiation comes from the active fusion process, and chamber lining that’s been bombarded by radiation. The worst case is a brief spike of neutron and gamma radiation from where the chamber breaches before the plasma collapses, a small amount of short-lived radioisotopes from the chamber debris, and a bit of tritium.
The radiation from the debris would be at background levels in a year or two, since there’s no transuranic decay chains (once decay event, and it’s stable again). The tritium would disperse to background levels in minutes, and the radiation burst would only be a hazard in the immediate vicinity.
Not free from issues at all, but compared to a fission reactor the worst-case scenario isn’t bad at all.
Great, and I also hear that the amount of nuclear waste is tiny in comparison to contemporary nuclear reactors.
A fusion power plant will not explode in any meaningful way
Alright, the more you know
Wind turbines kill birds and are noisy.
No they are not, no they do not.
Visit a wind farm. You will find far more dead birds at the base of a glass office building. Last summer I walked through a farm of 16 wind turbines and never saw a dead bird.
I had to laugh at this one lol
I watched a docu about one fusion startup in the US. They’re skipping the boiling water step and converting the energy directly to electricity.
I dont remember the mechanics of how though. But they reportedly are the closest to net positive.
Helion energy. But i don’t think their approach has been verified yet. So take it with a grain of salt.
I didn’t know someone was trying a different approach like that, their animated graphics were really cool.
Eventually someone has gotta figure this out, I just hope I’m alive to see it and the outcome of it.
Can we then use that electricity to power a boiler?
They have been trying to do this for a long time I think and have gotten very close. At least that’s what I thought
I’m old, fusion has been close for decades. Some reactors achieve unity but can’t sustain, some can sustain the plasma but don’t quite produce a net energy production, and all of them are limited by selection of materials compatible with the sheer radiation of the chamber.
We’re frustratingly close, and progress has been made, but I get the feeling it’s one of those areas of science where a large breakthrough in either MHD theory or material science is needed to kick fusion from info NG research into practically possible.
Can someone explain the solar panels bit at the bottom? Is it because the creator of the meme is advocating that as a cooler method of energy, given that it doesn’t use boiling water, or is it because the fusion reactor can utilise solar panels to convert the energy to electricity?
Because the Sun is a giant fusion reactor.
Oh okay. The reactor will still use steam boiling though
That’s the setup for the joke
Only maybe! DEC works similarly to how we collect energy in photovoltaics, and seems to be pretty promising
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Direct_energy_conversion?wprov=sfla1
My the actual intention of this joke, was to point out, that even if fusion will make again use of boiling water, we already have more “suffisticated” methods to generate electricity (like e.g. solar cells via the photovoltaic effect), that make not use of the great equalizer make wheel spin fast.
But based on many comments here (and yours is not one of them), this failed.
check out helion. they are trying to make small, modular reactors that are cheaper to build and maintain, so they can be deployed easier than fission reactors and the couple of fusion designs that already exist. iirc they have the actual fusion part working and are now working on actually getting the energy out of it. real engineering has some good videos about them on nebula and YouTube.
Super cool, thanks for the share. It will be interesting to see what sort of efficiency they get from the inductive energy transfer.
Hopefully they’re not just another Theranos.
Helion has had “a working power-producing system in five years!” since 2017.
sigh
How are solar panels made? Doesn’t it involve mining? Is it renewable?
I can really recommend this video by Technology Connections which answers your questions very well. It is long but entertaining and educational. The last 30 minutes is basically a rant about politics and I love every second of it.
they’re becoming pretty recyclable as far as i understand.
It’s massively impractical. You’re never gonna believe it.
These things require silicon (good luck finding sand!), but they’re mostly glass and aluminum (ridiculously rare substances that we can’t use willy-nilly on stuff that only lasts for 25 years, and then how are we gonna recycle that? we have no idea how to recycle glass and aluminum!), and then to make it scalable you’re gonna want some safe battery technology like sodium-ion (but where are we gonna find a bunch of salt on this blue planet?)
They are mostly glass and silica I think. The thing that generates electricity is basically a reverse LED. They are also highly recyclable, as the video linked in the other comment explains.
