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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.
Reminds me of one of my favorite photos, a steam engine being delivered by steam engine!
Did you mean to say a nuclear reactor being delivered by steam engine?
It’s a great photo though, kinda nuts how fast things moved then. It also reminds me of that story of a Chinese train driver standing next to the train he drives a few decades apart, from steam to high speed rail.China was notably one of the last places on earth to retire steam locomotives from revenue service, only ending mainline steam in 2005 and reportedly ending the last branchline’s use of steam in 2023, but may still have some revenue steam service surviving elsewhere
Bosnia still has some revenue steam service at a coal mine (notably running locomotives built by Germany using prisoner labor during WWII that were designed to use minimal resources and with a design life of only 10 years)
Derail Valley Simulator won’t let you drive that exact steam engine, but it simulates Diesel, Steam, and an Electric engine quite satisfactorily. To the point that I can’t use the steam engines without blowing them up accidentally.
But more seriously, watch the water in your sight glass, keep it about 3/4 full at all times and check it like you check your rear view mirror in your car, and don’t forget to open the cylinder cocks every time you stop (or at least when you first start moving) and you should be pretty good to avoid unexpected damage to your locomotive!
“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.
Hydrohomies!
We need this on lemmy
We have it already! ^^ <3
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
We live in a Steampunk world without Steampunk aesthetics. 😩
Cyberpunk-lite 😔
We don’t even deserve that much credit. We’re still mostly wearing the same clothes that we wore in the 70s…
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.
In Germany, funding for research is being cut alot. The solar cut happened a long time ago and fifty thousand jobs where lost at the time. Last year, they basically cancelled almost all battery research (needed for electric cars and stuff). Now, many more important stuff is being defunded. Except for fusion. Fusion is receiving a big boost in funding. Everyone and their dog are doing fusion research now
I think, that’s not despite the famous “fusion constant” (fusion being always “only” thirty years away), but because of it. Unlike solar or batteries or anything else that actually works, fusion does not threaten to disrupt the oligopolies of the power companies, or the car companies or anyone else’s. It enables a wealth transfer (accumulation through dispossession) to companies involved in the research, without contributing to the crisis of overaccumulation, because no use value exists, so no value ever needs to be realized. It’s like building a pyramid in the desert.
Ofc a new fully renewable insanely powerful source of energy will disrupt the oligopolicies of the power companies. It will disrupt nearly every inch of society.
If it’s possible at all
Bombs are insanely powerful too and yet useless as an energy source. What matters is cost in cent per kWh. Fusion showes every sign of becoming very very expensive, even in the best case scenarios.
Laser based fusion for example literally uses gold coated diamond pellets, hundreds of which have to be shot into the reaction chamber per second to even break even energyweise in theory. At that point, no energy is produced at all and costs per kWh are still infinit. And the lenses get destroyed so fast you constantly have to exchange them.
Meanwhile both renewables and energy storage technologies continue to get cheaper and cheaper. Fusion faces barriers in engineering, fundamental physics and even in mathematics (modeling plasma is critical). Some of which might be insurmountable in principle. But in the end the one barrier that matters is the economic one. And no one even has a plan on how to tackle it expect for shoveling an insane amount of tax money into the fire indefinitely.
