I’ve always found it slightly funny that nuclear power is technically just a fancy steam engine.
Almost all power source that generate electricity are fancy steam engines.
Wait, it’s all steam engines?
🔫 👩🚀🔫👩🚀 always has been
Never got this meme honestly, I should figure it out sometime 🔫🧑🚀🔫🧑🚀
Hydro, wind, solar, and wave/tide energy capture are not.
The crazy part is photovoltaics are the only power source that doesn’t spin something to make electricity. Truly an outlier.
solar
Except the ones that are. (Concentrated solar power)
…and the fancy steam engine version of solar is probably greener to build that photovoltaics, since it’s basically just a boiler and some mirrors.
Hydro is the most fancy steam engine since it waits for the water to recondense to make power.
Wait so does that make wind power more or less fancy than hydro?
Depends on the humidity
I never understood that either. It seems like the steam production is an extra step.
So my general understanding is that you can use a magnet to create an electrical current. Its like it pushes the electrons, like a paddle pushing water. So they coil a bunch of wire around a magnet and rotate the magnet, which moves the electrons in the wire and that gets you electrical power. But you need something to push that magnet around, so you attach that to a big ass fan and use steam to push the fan. That’s your turbine. Nuclear power is just using a hot rock to make the steam. Hydroelectric power uses a river to push the turbine. Wind power is doing the same thing, just uhhh, with wind.
Jesus christ this comment deserves a noble prize. Incredibly succinct explanation of something I didn’t get before.
I’m not really sure how else you’d do it. The energy we can get out of fission is in the form of heat, and steam isn’t as compressible as just gas and it’s easy to make with just heat. Combine that with electromagnetism giving you electricity by spinning some magnets around some coils, and there you go.
It’s probably possible to get some air hot enough and do some fancy convection work to get it to spin a rotor, but that’s going to be really inefficient.
You could also use the heat to make materials glow and put a solar panel nearby, but that’s also going to be pretty inefficient.
Get beta radiation and then put the electrons directly into the wires.
One by one.
Turning heat into mechanical or chemical or electric energy directly is really hard, you know.
It’s funny that you can get more energy from gas by using it to heat water and using a steam turbine to drive whatever. It’s just not always practical.
I swear Nuclear Reactors were designed by a chemist with a grudge against a physicist and engineer.
I love these, there’s no way that would ever work
Plot twist: In the original timeline, nuclear power generation didnt exist. Some time in the future, OP will become a time traveller and end up getting stuck in the past and therefore brining this idea to fruition, which is why we are on this timeline.
(OP, got any aspirations got being a time traveler yet? Come on, ya gotta complete the time loop.)
It was a bad call to stop, but now it’s an equally or worse call to start again.
Renewables win on essentially every measure and get better every day while nuclear gets worse every day.
That’s a lie. Renewables produce more CO2 than Nuclear reactors per unit energy produces. They can also be significantly more dangerous (higher number of deaths per unit energy) in the case of hydro power or biomass. Solar and batteries require various rare materials and produce significant pollution when manufactured and must be replaced every 20 or 30 years.
tbf, we have airplanes, but most goods are still being transported over lands or seas.
