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.
fun fact, u can also boil opposed spy satelites with that setup
Can you elaborate?
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.
How else are you going to make your tea?
The movie Sahara did it.
I have a theoretical degree in physics
Welcome aboard!
it better be a degree celsius
It’s in kelvin
Not a degree then.
TIL
The home alone guy?
ACTUALLY ITS BOILING SODIUM!!… ~which then gets used to boil water~
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
Solar panel projects, which many have outstripped this and other projects in power limitations, do not boil water to generate electricity.
And wind turbines, and hydroelectric plants.
But all but solar cells are pretty much turbines all the way down
Hydroelectric power stations still rely on steam, it’s just in another part of the cycle.
What? Hydroelectric power stations use gravity and the falling or flowing water makes the turbines turn. No steam.
Thermal plants (nuclear, coal, gas), including solar thermal plants, use steam.
He means water vapour, ie the rain cycle.
That’s not steam, though.
Ooooooooh.
Would not like to be the technician working on the hydrostation where part of the rain cycle is steam
Always has been.
Yeah but, really all these are just turbinepunk because in the end we’re pushing the turbine either by using steam or natural wind.
Supercritical CO2 turbine be like: whatup
This is the revelation my mustache has been waiting for.
Hey man I just want warm noodles
Oh neat like the ones outside Vegas, I always wonder if birds fly into the center
Well they certainly don’t fly out of it
The ones with cameras might, probably a big conspiracy
Sadly the ones outside Vegas are about to shut down because they are not profitable https://live-ier.pantheonsite.io/big-green/california-shuts-down-its-solar-thermal-plant-13-years-early/
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Clearly, the Obama administration decided to spend taxpayer funds on a technology that was poorly conceived and quickly outdated.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, moron writer guy. So what’s trump doing, investing in better renewables?
No, instead of building an underperforming power plant, he spent the same money just to prevent a power plant from being built.
Money for nothing and the chicks for free amirite.
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.
big advantage is that molten salt allows for energy storage for nighttime
Moths must love this shit
For like… 0.002 seconds it’s gotta feel real great
At night?
Curious how well it works with moon reflection
A construction like this could never work with moonlight, not even theoretically. There is a nice xkcd about it: https://what-if.xkcd.com/145/
Technically still solar power, but with the moon as an additional mirror in the system.
Free roast pidgeon for the workers
Yeah, but that secretly a lazer weapon.
USSR also built an experimental power plant of this type. Sadly, it was closed and disassembled after the breakup of the Soviet Union.
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.
Kickstart this new source of clean energy by burning fossil fuels and spraying CFCs into the air. A hotter planet means water boils easier! 😃
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.
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?
different tool for a different purpose. water has a large heat of evaporation which is something that allows for more compact turbines
sCO2 turbines are like 1/30th the size of an equivalent steam turbine.
Using water is cheaper and easier. That is all that stop your idea from being IRL.
“The only downside of your idea is that it is terrible.”
This kills the crab
geothermal typically uses chemicals other than water because they have a lower boiling point
the specific chemical being cheap is relatively unimportant if it’s a closed loop. the cost is next to nothing compared to the whole construction
Boiled water gang
Hot hydro homies in your area
