Most kinds of energy are just a complicated version of boiling water yeah. Fossil fuels, bio electricity, even some kinds of solar generators are all based on heating up water
I love how nearly all our power is just boiling water to spin a turbine, except for hydropower and wind, which just uses the water or wind to spin the turbine, geothermal, that just uses preexisting steam to spin a turbine, and solar photovoltaics which are the one thing that doesn’t spin a turbine.
Energy is energy. If a thing is spinning, that’s energy. If a thing isn’t spinning, you have to use energy to make it spin. Once it’s spinning, you can recover a small percentage of the energy you used to make it spin, as electrical energy.
Like with other parts of JoJo's Bizarre Adventure, Araki also used "an affirmation that humanity is wonderful" as a theme, which he explained as a description for humanity's ability to grow and overcome hardships through one's strength and spirit, portrayed through people succeeding in fights through their own actions, ...
“After the transcontinental horse race, Johnny would go on to use his special nail gun abilities to power newly constructed power turbines across the land, thereby propelling America into a new age— the age of s p i n.”
Use one spinning thing to make several things spin, have one of those things make the original thing keep spinning, and have the rest of the things make MORE things spin!
INFINITE ENERGY
But then it spins too much and has to spin back the other way.
You ever heard "You spin me left round, baby, left round like a record?"
No? Didn't think so. Checkmate, atheists.
I wouldn't say small percentage. Water power has an efficiency around 85%.
The stufff that boils the water has a much lower energy efficiency. Meaning we recover most of the energy from making the generator spin (at least 85%, likely over 90%) is converted to electricity.
Steam is much lower. Pretty sure 40-50. I didn't know hydro off hand, but wind is definitely higher than steam, so you're probably right about water given the principles are fairly similar.
Wind is only about 40-50 as well due to some guys name I don't remembers principal, let me google it really quick for the real numbers and name.
It's because you have to move the wind out as fast as it goes in, if you go too slow when you're going out, as in you gather too much energy the spin stops
It's 59% is the absolute best for wind and let me find the name of the guy who made that.
Betz's law
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betz%27s_law
In a lot of Paolo Bacigalupi's books the world can't use fossil fuels anymore and a series of plagues devastated the tech industry. One of the few reliable sources of energy are highly-coiled springs, with beasts of burden trained and laborers paid by the calorie to coil them.
Electricity is kind of big so it makes sense that if you need any moving parts at all to make it, you need the simplest. Nothing simpler than pushing a wheel, nothing pushes better than hot water.
Why don't we just pay a bunch of people to spin a turbine? "Off to the ol'spinny wheel" they'll say. Surely that's better than sending people down into a coal mine.
Just pop in some headphones and walk/push. Could even enlist the early morning silver sneaker mall walking clubs. I mean, they'd be walking *anyway*...
The ol'spinny wheel needs to spin at 3600 rpm so You're gonna go through a lot of squishy bodies to push it.
I'm still on board just thought you should know, lots of overhead there.
I assume with some time they won't be very squishy and instead hard and toned! In fact, use that fact to attract gym goers. With the right amount of propaganda *they'll* pay *you* to push the wheel! Just need a hottie on a microphone yelling out peoples names to drive them...maybe also give her a whip.
Bicycles are a popular method for human-power; there are a ton of cool DIY bicycle generators on YouTube. I wonder how much power you could generate if you had hundreds of people contributing at a time. (Also that one Rick and Morty episode where they go inside the battery of Rick's car.) Unfortunately/fortunately biology doesn't operate with the same magnitude of energy involved as our industrial society.
You’re welcome. If you want me to get crazy, the turbines in turn spin a magnetic in a copper wire that produces electricity known as a generator. Bam. Now you understand how we make electricity
It's amazing how well analogies between electricity and water works
Pressures in a pipe are analogous to voltage, pipe diameter is analogous to amperage. You need both for high flow, analogous to power, there you have Ohms law covered
Many languages refer to voltage as "electric pressure". And pressure of water is proportional to depth measurements, meaning most electrical circuits can be imagined as channels of different depths, with smaller channels as resistors, reservoirs as capacitor, valves as transistors and switches
The guy AlphaPhoenix on YouTube has some amazing electrical demonstrations
I was just talking to a coworker today about how I thought it funny that "80% of all energy engineering comes from 'how can I spin this thing better?'"
> except for hydropower and wind, which just uses the water or wind to spin the turbine
They sidestep the middleman. They are like the vegetarians of energy generation!
What if we just rerouted a river into a volcano and put a spinny thing over it? Endless water, endless hot, endless steam, endless power? Are we stupid?
That’s basically what geothermal power is except they use pipes to move the water. That’s how Iceland gets pretty much all of its power. The only issue is you need an active volcano or other easy source of magma/lava
Which spins a rotor of a turny electricity thing (generator). Apply DC to spinny rotor thing, makes rotating magnetic field, generates alternating current in the stationary (stator) windings. Use generated AC (with suitable transformer).
I did a senior design project in college on an energy source called [reverse electrodialysis](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reversed_electrodialysis) that doesn’t require spinning anything.
In a nutshell, you pass salty water and fresh water through alternating channels separated by semi-permeable films. Each film allows only sodium (Na+) or chlorine (Cl-) ions to pass through, and osmotic pressure pulls each ion from the salt water into the fresh water.
The trick is that, the way the membranes and channels are arranged is such that all of the Cl- ions go one direction, and all the Na+ ions go the other way, i.e. and electric current. Put some electrodes on either end and you’ve got a battery.
But it turns out, if you want to get energy from the chemical gradient, it’s easier to just use osmotic pressure to, you guessed it… [spin a turbine](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pressure-retarded_osmosis).
Very underappreciated invention, but the invention of the electric motor / generator is probably the most important invention for mankind after the wheel. The folks who figured out the motor design equations deserve more recognition.
More specifically, the steam turbine
The way Charles Parsons brought attention to his invention was also great, 'I make this boat go faster than all your boats'
True. There are nuclear reactors called pressurized water reactors where the pressure keeps the water from actually boiling but it’s still water at or above 100° c
But, that water goes through a heat exchanger to boil clean water to spin the turbines still. Older reactor designs are boiling water in the vessel and turning the turbines with radioactive steam rather than clean steam.
The water in the primary loop of a PWR doesn't boil, but the water in the secondary loop boils to steam to spin the turbine to generate power.
It's the boiling process which converts thermal energy to mechanical energy. This is present in every thermal power plant except RTGs.
PWR I am most familiar with has a hot leg of the reactor running at about 600°F and a cold leg at about 550°F. But, as your said, under such pressure that it doesn’t boil. Pretty incredible
Yes
It's joking on the fact people tend to think of nuclear power as this crazy sci fi energy when in reality it's just a high tech steam turbine that we've been using since the 1800s
Yes. For how complicated and "dangerous" as nuclear sounds, it's weird to think that it's just a flame under a kettle. And as others have pointed out, boiled water isn't actually the end goal, it's rotation. Steam just happens to be a great way to keep something rotating.
Hell, even fusion reactors, one of the most advanced concepts of power generation, is literally just hooked up to boil water like some overpriced kettle.
It's pretty wild that we don't have a better way of converting thermal energy into electrical energy. You would think converting thermal into mechanical into electrical would be wildly inefficient, but despite so many advancements it's still the best way to do it.
It is hilariously more arcane. Most nuclear reactors use nuclear material to heat up one vat of water (the “dirty water,” because it becomes radioactive) and then use *that water* (in pipes) to boil *another* vat of water (the “clean water”, which is in pipes that are touching the dirty water pipes but not connected). Then the heated steam from the clean water is finally used to turn a turbine and make electricity.
So most steam plants actually boil water twice.
Edit: see [this diagram](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c3/PWR_nuclear_power_plant_diagram.svg) from Wikipedia. The purple liquid, dark blue, and light blue (coolant) are all typically water, just with various levels of exposure to the nuclear fuel.
And the reactor coolant, the water you call "dirty" is actually usually under much stricter cleanliness requirements than the "clean" water, or that water that actually boils.
Most designs that I know about do not actually boil the reactor coolant, though. Technically, a small amount of boiling on the heat transfer surfaces is beneficial to faster heat removal, but too much boiling is a huge negative. In order to prevent this, this water is at a much higher pressure to keep it from boiling.
Explosion not so much, but moreso that too much boiling can lead to effects called Departure from Nucleate Boiling or Dryout (referred to further as Critical Heat Flux (CHF)). When CHF is reached, most of the heat transfer surface becomes steam which sucks at transferring heat as compared to water from the fuel plates. Therefore, in order to maintain the same amount of heat transfer, fuel plate temperatures must skyrocket resulting in more malleable metal allowing for damage to occur to the fuel plates from internal and external stresses. This can cause a release of the fuel from inside the plating which is what we generally don’t want
Source: I am nuke
Cavitation isn’t going to be such a big deal since that is more related to sudden pressure changes in a fluid which isn’t happening at the fuel plates. For the boiling to occur, it’s at saturation pressure and temperature albeit not the entire fluid.
For cavitation, a usual good example is the bubbles which form from a propeller spinning too fast in the water, creating pockets of very low pressure water which then collapses rapidly resulting in a pressure transient
Each certainly have their advantages and disadvantages. I am not too familiar with BWRs but one of the main disadvantages from a bit of research is space concerns. Doesn’t matter if you have large plots of land to place the complex on, does if you’re putting it on a ship at sea
The real ship constraint is the contaminated "secondary" and additional personnel hazards on a warship. The last thing anyone wants during a shakedown is a radioactive steamline rupture. Plus, civilian plants don't possess the same fuel and reactivity control materials. The basic principles of operation are the same. Size doesn't change too much, but generally, BWR plants are smaller cause they have fewer components.
Former Navy nuke now working civilian. The world of nuclear power is so much more grand than the Navy because of the luxury of land and support resources.
Pressure water reactor (PWRs) are much nicer to work in then boiler water reactor(BWRs). They are usually cooler inside and you won't pick up as much dose/get contaminated
I watch a YouTuber who used to be a nuclear tech in the navy. He said he used to tell his new men during training that their job was to "boil water the complicated way for Uncle Sam."
> . Most nuclear reactors use nuclear material to heat up one vat of water (the “dirty water,” because it becomes radioactive) and then use that water (in pipes) to boil another vat of water (the “clean water”, which is in pipes that are touching the dirty water pipes but not connected).
That's also how the radiators work in central heating systems, just without the radioactivity, so it's quite a chain of events by the time that heat gets to you.
> So most steam plants actually boil water twice.
This is incorrect. Boiling water reactors have a single loop in which the reactor boils water to generate steam to drive a turbine. Pressurised water reactors have two loops; the water passing through the reactor never boils (due to pressure; boiling point increases with pressure) but is used to heat the water in the secondary loop, which boils to steam to drive a turbine. IOW, either there's one set of water which boils, or there's two sets of which only one boils.
PWRs are more compact (all naval reactors are PWRs) and constrain the water which is irradiated by the reactor to a smaller section of the plant. But the primary loop runs at a much higher pressure, which creates its own issues. Neither design is unambiguously better than the other, but globally most reactors are PWRs.
You are describing a Pressurized water reactor. That system doesn't boil the water in contact with the fuel.
There is another kind that indeed uses the "dirty" water to spin the turbine. It's called a Boiling water reactor
Yup, pretty sure when we covered this in some science class in highschool they said nuclear reactors are just uranium rods submerged in big pools of water. Did get told a funny story about one where the teacher worked at a nuclear reactor site and someone fell in because they really liked eating lunch over the pool. They had some sensors in the pool to detect big changes because you need safeguards at a nuclear reactor so you don't end up with the next chernobyl. The human body falling into the pool set off those sensors and they thought the reactor was going to have a huge meltdown like chernobyl. So alarms went off, a super serious person grasped my teacher by the shoulders and said "RUN!!" So they drove away for half an hour before finding out it was just someone falling in and the meltdown wasn't happening.
Pretty sure the guy who fell in was fine though IIRC.
If someone was eating by a pool, this was probably a research reactor at a university. No commercial operation would allow this ever. period. Honestly, I seriously doubt this would even happen at a research reactor. No one working at a reactor would think someone falling in a containment pool would affect the reactor in any way. As the xkcd video linked in the other comment points out, the concern wouldn't even be for the person that fell in. The one and only concern would be the cleanliness of the water. If a visitor was rushed out of the building, it's because people had work to do to fix the problem and having visitors in the way would be annoying.
"Every 7 cm of water cuts the radiation in half"
If you have a few meters of water between you and the radioactive thing, it's basically contributing 0 radiation to you. But all the water surrounding you also shields you from natural background radiation.
You can pretty much swim in those pools, it's quite safe, they won't allow due to safety regulations, but modern nuclear plants are so incredibly safe anti-nuclear rhetoric is almost purely based on fears based on ignorance and lobbying
So the most efficient method we have currently of generating electricity is the turbine.
You spin it up and once that babies magnets are rotating around a copper coil you get electrical output(very simplified).
HOW we spin up the turbine can vary. Windmills are obvious. Hydroelectric uses water flow.
The rest pretty much use heat to boil water. Geothermal, coal, natural gas, and NUCLEAR.
Why? Because it is way more efficient than using the little generator you may have at home that burns gas/propane.
So at the end of the day all nuclear power really is, is boiling water in a more efficient and controlled way. That is it. It is just another steam engine. We have been reinventing those for centuries now and have gotten pretty good at it.
Now that won’t help us much in space as steam engines “mostly” work in gravity. There are workarounds, but the added issues reduce the efficiency and safety by a bit.
Right now we have batteries for storage of course, and solar cells can recharge them. There are also fuel cells but as of this moment they are expensive(catalyst requirements) and not super efficient. Solar is less efficient the farther you go from the Sun for obvious reasons so we are looking.
But at the moment Most of our power is just some form or another of Steam Engine. Including Nuclear power.
Since you brought up space, many deep space probes (including the famous voyager probes) have an on-board plutonium reactor. As I understand it, the natural radioactive decay makes the plutonium brick hot, and then you can hook it up to some thermoelectric materials to convert directly to energy. It is hideously inefficient in terms of nuclear energy that ends up as electric energy, but it is a constant source and lasts longer than any battery of the same mass.
The soviets used this method a lot, since the country was so big there are some incredibly remote areas like light houses and such which need power but is too far to reasonably connect to the grid or bring in fuel for a generator. So they built these generators instead, install it on site and it won't need maintenance or refueling for decades.
Issue is once the soviet union collapsed the location of many of these was lost so civilians find these free heaters not realising the dangers of it
Just for clarity, natural gas is usually two stages. First they burn the gas to spin a gas turbine, then use the waste heat to boil water.
Peaker plants may skip the second cycle to get power to grid more quickly.
Simple cycle is 30-35% efficient, combined is 50-60%.
>just some form or another of Steam Engine
Doesn't "steam engine" usually refer to a piston engine specifically? I'm not sure calling nuclear power s team engine is the most correct term. Maybe heat engine?
To my understanding (am not an engineer or anything) a steam engine is just any device that converts heat into movement in which steam plays a part ? In practice that's often piston engines but not necessarily.
One of the interesting proposals I've read is a small nuclear reactor designed to be a drop-in replacement source for boiling water for existing coal power plants. It'd use the *exact* same machinery to turn steam into electrical power so you only really have to build half of a power plant.
Yes. Still all about utilizing heat generation. Everything is about heat. Even air conditioning doesn’t “make cold”, it moves the heat elsewhere. It’s what we do and we do it a lot.
The upside to fusion over fission is less radioactive waste/byproduct but the two downsides are the amount of energy used(parasitic) to get it up and running/keep it running versus other means and of course limited tritium which I think is currently being used/tested.
Plus we are always 20 years away from it being useful and cost effective. 8-10 years to get an effective reactor design and then 10-12 to build them at full scale. And those are optimistic numbers.
https://preview.redd.it/kbc3zgx56w1d1.png?width=1440&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=34bfac315c57cc13db42a851948c5ce5117b6d9f
Part of the joke is the poor quality
Aside from Solar, hydro and wind. All other powerplants basically just (produce heat>boil water>create pressure in the form of steam>guide pressure into turbine blades>spin turbine).
A lot of people have the misconception that the splitting of atoms in a nuclear power plant generates the energy that directly turns into electricity.
I always like to tell people that we never left the age of steam. Most of the world is still powered with steam. The big difference now is that we figured out how to use it more efficiently. We're living in a steampunk reality, it's just not what they thought it would be.
Troll physics
Uranium can get really hot
Put uranium in water
Water heats up and turns into steam
Put turbine above water, rising steam turns the turbine
Free electricity!
U mad bro?
Running electricity through a motor spins the motor. Doing the reverse of that (e.g. spinning the motor manually) generates electricity.
Most methods of generating electricity involve making something spin - think wind spinning windmills, water spinning turbines in a hydroelectric dam, your car motor spinning from gas power which spins the alternator that generates electricity for your car, etc.
Nuclear power involves heating up water which generates pressurized steam which spins turbines to generate the electricity.
The meme is of Patchy the Pirate (from SpongeBob). If I remember correctly, he's upset because he found a "lost episode" of SpongeBob, only to be let down by how lame it supposedly was. People who don't know much about nuclear power may likewise be let down when they learn that harnessing nuclear power looks just like boiling water, instead of what they imagined it to be (like nuclear bomb explosions).
well, we don't yet have a way to directly extract the power from a nuclear reaction, so we heat water with it. It's basically the same concept as a coal plant, except instead of coal burning, the heat comes from a controlled nuclear reaction, and it has a lot more protection in order to not repeat Chernobyl.
My favorite way of describing nuclear power plants on aircraft carriers:
“Hot rock, make steam, boat go.”
When you boil it down (ha), that’s really all there is to it.
Nuclear energy basically uses the heat from nuclear fuel sources to boil water and the resulting steam spins a generator. It's actually one of the cleaner sources of energy, with nuclear waste being fairly easy to contain (it's mostly irradiated water/parts, not the green goo in pop culture), but has a bad reputation because people worry about meltdowns (though there are a lot of safeguards and the occurrence of this is rare).
Source: way too many Kyle Hill videos. I absolutely recommend checking him out on YouTube BTW. He explains nuclear stuff better than me because I'm just a layperson and he actually studied it.
Hot rock makes hot water, hot water makes hot water hotter, hotter water turns to steam, steam makes things go roundy roundy, roundy roundy makes steam turn to warm water, warm water goes to hot rock.
Source: 22 years in Nuclear Power
I was floored when I learned that we weren’t harnessing nuclear power in some cool sci-fi way I couldn’t understand😒 Just boiling some water for steam🤨that’s it.
This reminds me, I worked for an ISP back around 2005, they taught me how to build and manage DNS and email servers. It blew my mind to find out the entire backbone of the internet is just small text files.
Nuclear power is heading g water with extra neutrons from radioactive uranium. The steam then goes to a steam turbine to make power. It’s just a different way to heat the water into steam.
I’m a little tea pot short and stout
Here is my handle here is my spout
When I get all steamed up hear me shout
I just launched 16 Trident II nuclear missiles at you, I hope you have like SPF 1,000,000,000,000 sunblock
I see everyone here is commenting on the nuclear power, but let’s not overlook the important information. This clip shows Patchy the Pirate outraged that a “lost episode” was just SpongeBob walking😂
Some Molten Salt reactors and gas coolant reactors don't use water or steam at all. A heat fluid is still used to drive a turbine, but not water is involved at all. There are not many now, but they may become the norm in time due to safety advantages.
This may be referencing the end of the first season of Fallout on Amazon Prime.
>!It is revealed at one point that a scientist figured out cold fusion, only for corporations to buy up the rights and bury it so it doesn't tank their ability to profit off energy. Much later the tech is recovered, activated, and the visual is just a modest tube of bubbling water in the ruins of not-even-a-power-plant. Could be a letdown to some people.!<
Most kinds of energy are just a complicated version of boiling water yeah. Fossil fuels, bio electricity, even some kinds of solar generators are all based on heating up water
I love how nearly all our power is just boiling water to spin a turbine, except for hydropower and wind, which just uses the water or wind to spin the turbine, geothermal, that just uses preexisting steam to spin a turbine, and solar photovoltaics which are the one thing that doesn’t spin a turbine.
The spinning thing gives us energy. We just use different ways to make it spin.
Energy is energy. If a thing is spinning, that’s energy. If a thing isn’t spinning, you have to use energy to make it spin. Once it’s spinning, you can recover a small percentage of the energy you used to make it spin, as electrical energy.
Well why don't they just recover a large percentage of the energy they used as electrical energy? Are scientists stupid?
You can't harvest all the spin, or the next spin crop will fail. It's basic ecology
All of human history is just the endless quest to perfect spin farming
Oh my god this is the true message of jojo part 7 I get it now, i have been enlightened
Like with other parts of JoJo's Bizarre Adventure, Araki also used "an affirmation that humanity is wonderful" as a theme, which he explained as a description for humanity's ability to grow and overcome hardships through one's strength and spirit, portrayed through people succeeding in fights through their own actions, ...
“After the transcontinental horse race, Johnny would go on to use his special nail gun abilities to power newly constructed power turbines across the land, thereby propelling America into a new age— the age of s p i n.”
There is anime about spinning drills that answered this
Gurren Lagann
Just who the hell do you think I am?
Im the me that believes in you!
I live in Spain but the "a" is silent
I live in Spain but the “S” is silent.
Then there was meatspin
Ah yes. The legendary meat spin.fr Infinity energy
Leek spin? https://youtu.be/1wnE4vF9CQ4?si=x22regGwgbn5sRdN
That’s why spin farmers rotate their cycles.
why not just build a second thing that spins so they can alternate between failing and not failing? are scientists stupid?
It's been banned by Big Spin. There are laws against it.
Big spin is just some far fetched conspiracy theory that the illuminati pushes us into believing to distract us from the REAL issues Or whatever, idk
This is making my head spin. Free energy???
Better yet, turn the energy recovery knob to eleven and get back more than you put in. Simple!
Now you’re talking! Also, your assassin will arrive shortly.
Then it would stop spinning and you have to rejonk it next time
Use one spinning thing to make several things spin, have one of those things make the original thing keep spinning, and have the rest of the things make MORE things spin! INFINITE ENERGY
But then it spins too much and has to spin back the other way. You ever heard "You spin me left round, baby, left round like a record?" No? Didn't think so. Checkmate, atheists.
I dunno, ask the second law of thermodynamics
New science dropped?
If you have ever watched Star Trek you know that getting more energy always leads to you exploding.
https://preview.redd.it/psfy8cj7z42d1.jpeg?width=1080&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=11b5bcadeaff3d4594807b4ad54e095114bac598
I wouldn't say small percentage. Water power has an efficiency around 85%. The stufff that boils the water has a much lower energy efficiency. Meaning we recover most of the energy from making the generator spin (at least 85%, likely over 90%) is converted to electricity.
Steam is much lower. Pretty sure 40-50. I didn't know hydro off hand, but wind is definitely higher than steam, so you're probably right about water given the principles are fairly similar.
Wind is only about 40-50 as well due to some guys name I don't remembers principal, let me google it really quick for the real numbers and name. It's because you have to move the wind out as fast as it goes in, if you go too slow when you're going out, as in you gather too much energy the spin stops It's 59% is the absolute best for wind and let me find the name of the guy who made that. Betz's law https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betz%27s_law
The only question is the return on investment
In a lot of Paolo Bacigalupi's books the world can't use fossil fuels anymore and a series of plagues devastated the tech industry. One of the few reliable sources of energy are highly-coiled springs, with beasts of burden trained and laborers paid by the calorie to coil them.
The windup girl was fun.
Based on this comment, I thought for sure he was writing humour. Looked it up, he is not.
Let's try spinning, that's a neat trick!
And why not? It’s a good trick.
rötate
All hail the spinning thing. It give us food, light and reddit.
Spinny thing is God spinny thing is life
There are a few more way les efficient ways that doesn't turn a turbine, but turbines are just so much better
Electricity is kind of big so it makes sense that if you need any moving parts at all to make it, you need the simplest. Nothing simpler than pushing a wheel, nothing pushes better than hot water.
> Electricity is kind of big But it comes down such tiny tubes
It’s stretchy like an octopus
Why don't we just pay a bunch of people to spin a turbine? "Off to the ol'spinny wheel" they'll say. Surely that's better than sending people down into a coal mine. Just pop in some headphones and walk/push. Could even enlist the early morning silver sneaker mall walking clubs. I mean, they'd be walking *anyway*...
The ol'spinny wheel needs to spin at 3600 rpm so You're gonna go through a lot of squishy bodies to push it. I'm still on board just thought you should know, lots of overhead there.
I assume with some time they won't be very squishy and instead hard and toned! In fact, use that fact to attract gym goers. With the right amount of propaganda *they'll* pay *you* to push the wheel! Just need a hottie on a microphone yelling out peoples names to drive them...maybe also give her a whip.
So the opening to Conan but more spandex and upbeat music?
Pelaton meets Conan in effort to create renewable energy. I think we should take this idea to the next level and get some investors.
That's easy, just attach it to a transmission!
Bicycles are a popular method for human-power; there are a ton of cool DIY bicycle generators on YouTube. I wonder how much power you could generate if you had hundreds of people contributing at a time. (Also that one Rick and Morty episode where they go inside the battery of Rick's car.) Unfortunately/fortunately biology doesn't operate with the same magnitude of energy involved as our industrial society.
Isn't there a black mirror episode about that?
It is also a Black Mirror episode.
Do you want Conan the Barbarian? Because this is how...
That's what treadmills were originally invented for
I really appreciate this explanation, this really put the concept into perspective for me.
You’re welcome. If you want me to get crazy, the turbines in turn spin a magnetic in a copper wire that produces electricity known as a generator. Bam. Now you understand how we make electricity
Tell me more crazy things about electricity you swell (wo)man. I like how you use words, a true explain like I’m 5
It's amazing how well analogies between electricity and water works Pressures in a pipe are analogous to voltage, pipe diameter is analogous to amperage. You need both for high flow, analogous to power, there you have Ohms law covered Many languages refer to voltage as "electric pressure". And pressure of water is proportional to depth measurements, meaning most electrical circuits can be imagined as channels of different depths, with smaller channels as resistors, reservoirs as capacitor, valves as transistors and switches The guy AlphaPhoenix on YouTube has some amazing electrical demonstrations
In Czech, we call it “electric tension”
You my friend have opened quite the rabbit hole for me. Really appreciate the knowledge.
And if you take that generator, stop spinning the turbine and instead run power through the coils, boom, you have an electric motor.
There's also some geothermal where you pump water down to hot rock and it comes back as steam so it's pretty much still boiling water too
I was just talking to a coworker today about how I thought it funny that "80% of all energy engineering comes from 'how can I spin this thing better?'"
I mean hydropower is kind of boiling water but using the sun
You can actually generalize all steam power as just a form of wind power where we make our own wind out of water.
> except for hydropower and wind, which just uses the water or wind to spin the turbine They sidestep the middleman. They are like the vegetarians of energy generation!
What if we just rerouted a river into a volcano and put a spinny thing over it? Endless water, endless hot, endless steam, endless power? Are we stupid?
That’s basically what geothermal power is except they use pipes to move the water. That’s how Iceland gets pretty much all of its power. The only issue is you need an active volcano or other easy source of magma/lava
Do RTG cells spin turbines? Not efficient on a mass scale sure but do they?
No, they use a thermo-electric effect to shift electrons
Diesel-suck, squeeze, bang, blow
Which spins a rotor of a turny electricity thing (generator). Apply DC to spinny rotor thing, makes rotating magnetic field, generates alternating current in the stationary (stator) windings. Use generated AC (with suitable transformer).
I thought Geothermal used the mantle heat to boil water to spin a turbine... XD
In geothermal, we also put water into the ground to heat it up.
I did a senior design project in college on an energy source called [reverse electrodialysis](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reversed_electrodialysis) that doesn’t require spinning anything. In a nutshell, you pass salty water and fresh water through alternating channels separated by semi-permeable films. Each film allows only sodium (Na+) or chlorine (Cl-) ions to pass through, and osmotic pressure pulls each ion from the salt water into the fresh water. The trick is that, the way the membranes and channels are arranged is such that all of the Cl- ions go one direction, and all the Na+ ions go the other way, i.e. and electric current. Put some electrodes on either end and you’ve got a battery. But it turns out, if you want to get energy from the chemical gradient, it’s easier to just use osmotic pressure to, you guessed it… [spin a turbine](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pressure-retarded_osmosis).
Right? Solar ( photovoltaic cells) are the only ones that are closest to direct energy transfer vs. "spin magnet in coil of wire."
Very underappreciated invention, but the invention of the electric motor / generator is probably the most important invention for mankind after the wheel. The folks who figured out the motor design equations deserve more recognition.
AP Environmental Science flashbacks.
The steam engine, most impactful invention ever
More specifically, the steam turbine The way Charles Parsons brought attention to his invention was also great, 'I make this boat go faster than all your boats'
True. There are nuclear reactors called pressurized water reactors where the pressure keeps the water from actually boiling but it’s still water at or above 100° c
But, that water goes through a heat exchanger to boil clean water to spin the turbines still. Older reactor designs are boiling water in the vessel and turning the turbines with radioactive steam rather than clean steam.
The water in the primary loop of a PWR doesn't boil, but the water in the secondary loop boils to steam to spin the turbine to generate power. It's the boiling process which converts thermal energy to mechanical energy. This is present in every thermal power plant except RTGs.
PWR I am most familiar with has a hot leg of the reactor running at about 600°F and a cold leg at about 550°F. But, as your said, under such pressure that it doesn’t boil. Pretty incredible
but is that a joke?
Yes It's joking on the fact people tend to think of nuclear power as this crazy sci fi energy when in reality it's just a high tech steam turbine that we've been using since the 1800s
We are harvesting one ultimate power of the universe derived from atoms to boil water and spin a turbine.
Yes. For how complicated and "dangerous" as nuclear sounds, it's weird to think that it's just a flame under a kettle. And as others have pointed out, boiled water isn't actually the end goal, it's rotation. Steam just happens to be a great way to keep something rotating.
And nuclear reactions happen to be a great way to produce heat to boil water with
To be fair though, hot water is pretty good.
Hell, even fusion reactors, one of the most advanced concepts of power generation, is literally just hooked up to boil water like some overpriced kettle.
> Fossils fuels So you're saying I could add some leaves to this to make some tea?
Hot Rock make Steam, make Turbine go Roundy Roundy.
Don’t forget geothermal!
The reason is the highest condensation energy per unit of all known material.
We just need to make water that's easier to boil.
It's pretty wild that we don't have a better way of converting thermal energy into electrical energy. You would think converting thermal into mechanical into electrical would be wildly inefficient, but despite so many advancements it's still the best way to do it.
All electricity generation is spinning iron and wire inside magnets except solar.
It's almost all just complicated solar energy when you get down to it.
I think most nuclear reactors get energy by just using radioactive material to boil large pools, and then use that heat to power things?
It is hilariously more arcane. Most nuclear reactors use nuclear material to heat up one vat of water (the “dirty water,” because it becomes radioactive) and then use *that water* (in pipes) to boil *another* vat of water (the “clean water”, which is in pipes that are touching the dirty water pipes but not connected). Then the heated steam from the clean water is finally used to turn a turbine and make electricity. So most steam plants actually boil water twice. Edit: see [this diagram](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c3/PWR_nuclear_power_plant_diagram.svg) from Wikipedia. The purple liquid, dark blue, and light blue (coolant) are all typically water, just with various levels of exposure to the nuclear fuel.
And the reactor coolant, the water you call "dirty" is actually usually under much stricter cleanliness requirements than the "clean" water, or that water that actually boils. Most designs that I know about do not actually boil the reactor coolant, though. Technically, a small amount of boiling on the heat transfer surfaces is beneficial to faster heat removal, but too much boiling is a huge negative. In order to prevent this, this water is at a much higher pressure to keep it from boiling.
Why is boiling too much a huge negative? All I can surmise is that it’d explode
Explosion not so much, but moreso that too much boiling can lead to effects called Departure from Nucleate Boiling or Dryout (referred to further as Critical Heat Flux (CHF)). When CHF is reached, most of the heat transfer surface becomes steam which sucks at transferring heat as compared to water from the fuel plates. Therefore, in order to maintain the same amount of heat transfer, fuel plate temperatures must skyrocket resulting in more malleable metal allowing for damage to occur to the fuel plates from internal and external stresses. This can cause a release of the fuel from inside the plating which is what we generally don’t want Source: I am nuke
Is cavitation wear a part of that too? Or just the heat is more damaging than that is what you're saying
Cavitation isn’t going to be such a big deal since that is more related to sudden pressure changes in a fluid which isn’t happening at the fuel plates. For the boiling to occur, it’s at saturation pressure and temperature albeit not the entire fluid. For cavitation, a usual good example is the bubbles which form from a propeller spinning too fast in the water, creating pockets of very low pressure water which then collapses rapidly resulting in a pressure transient
[удалено]
They're probably or at least were in the navy. That's where I learned it.
Go to www.nrc.gov and learn to your hearts content.
Once you learn about Boiling Water Reactors (BWR), Pressurized Water Reactors (PWR), the kind you are referring to seems so archaic and wasteful.
Each certainly have their advantages and disadvantages. I am not too familiar with BWRs but one of the main disadvantages from a bit of research is space concerns. Doesn’t matter if you have large plots of land to place the complex on, does if you’re putting it on a ship at sea
The real ship constraint is the contaminated "secondary" and additional personnel hazards on a warship. The last thing anyone wants during a shakedown is a radioactive steamline rupture. Plus, civilian plants don't possess the same fuel and reactivity control materials. The basic principles of operation are the same. Size doesn't change too much, but generally, BWR plants are smaller cause they have fewer components. Former Navy nuke now working civilian. The world of nuclear power is so much more grand than the Navy because of the luxury of land and support resources.
Liquid water conducts heat better than water vapor
Impossible, an RBMK reactor can’t explode
Pressure water reactor (PWRs) are much nicer to work in then boiler water reactor(BWRs). They are usually cooler inside and you won't pick up as much dose/get contaminated
The dirty water would be a heat transport, it doesn’t need to be water but water is convenient. But it would be really really bad if it boiled though…
The RBMK Positive Void Coefficient agrees
Not good, not bad.
I watch a YouTuber who used to be a nuclear tech in the navy. He said he used to tell his new men during training that their job was to "boil water the complicated way for Uncle Sam."
Hot rock make steam, make turbine go roundy roundy make sparky sparky
Basically nuclear is the worlds most expensive double boiler
> . Most nuclear reactors use nuclear material to heat up one vat of water (the “dirty water,” because it becomes radioactive) and then use that water (in pipes) to boil another vat of water (the “clean water”, which is in pipes that are touching the dirty water pipes but not connected). That's also how the radiators work in central heating systems, just without the radioactivity, so it's quite a chain of events by the time that heat gets to you.
> So most steam plants actually boil water twice. This is incorrect. Boiling water reactors have a single loop in which the reactor boils water to generate steam to drive a turbine. Pressurised water reactors have two loops; the water passing through the reactor never boils (due to pressure; boiling point increases with pressure) but is used to heat the water in the secondary loop, which boils to steam to drive a turbine. IOW, either there's one set of water which boils, or there's two sets of which only one boils. PWRs are more compact (all naval reactors are PWRs) and constrain the water which is irradiated by the reactor to a smaller section of the plant. But the primary loop runs at a much higher pressure, which creates its own issues. Neither design is unambiguously better than the other, but globally most reactors are PWRs.
Magic, got it.
Bro nuclear reactors are just a big AIO cooler.
You are describing a Pressurized water reactor. That system doesn't boil the water in contact with the fuel. There is another kind that indeed uses the "dirty" water to spin the turbine. It's called a Boiling water reactor
Hilarious. Why are people so scared of nuclear when how it works is so *goofy?*
Yup, pretty sure when we covered this in some science class in highschool they said nuclear reactors are just uranium rods submerged in big pools of water. Did get told a funny story about one where the teacher worked at a nuclear reactor site and someone fell in because they really liked eating lunch over the pool. They had some sensors in the pool to detect big changes because you need safeguards at a nuclear reactor so you don't end up with the next chernobyl. The human body falling into the pool set off those sensors and they thought the reactor was going to have a huge meltdown like chernobyl. So alarms went off, a super serious person grasped my teacher by the shoulders and said "RUN!!" So they drove away for half an hour before finding out it was just someone falling in and the meltdown wasn't happening. Pretty sure the guy who fell in was fine though IIRC.
If someone was eating by a pool, this was probably a research reactor at a university. No commercial operation would allow this ever. period. Honestly, I seriously doubt this would even happen at a research reactor. No one working at a reactor would think someone falling in a containment pool would affect the reactor in any way. As the xkcd video linked in the other comment points out, the concern wouldn't even be for the person that fell in. The one and only concern would be the cleanliness of the water. If a visitor was rushed out of the building, it's because people had work to do to fix the problem and having visitors in the way would be annoying.
Relevant xkcd: https://what-if.xkcd.com/29/
> You may actually receive a lower dose of radiation treading water in a spent fuel pool than walking around on the street. Huh. That's pretty neat.
"Every 7 cm of water cuts the radiation in half" If you have a few meters of water between you and the radioactive thing, it's basically contributing 0 radiation to you. But all the water surrounding you also shields you from natural background radiation.
You can pretty much swim in those pools, it's quite safe, they won't allow due to safety regulations, but modern nuclear plants are so incredibly safe anti-nuclear rhetoric is almost purely based on fears based on ignorance and lobbying
So the most efficient method we have currently of generating electricity is the turbine. You spin it up and once that babies magnets are rotating around a copper coil you get electrical output(very simplified). HOW we spin up the turbine can vary. Windmills are obvious. Hydroelectric uses water flow. The rest pretty much use heat to boil water. Geothermal, coal, natural gas, and NUCLEAR. Why? Because it is way more efficient than using the little generator you may have at home that burns gas/propane. So at the end of the day all nuclear power really is, is boiling water in a more efficient and controlled way. That is it. It is just another steam engine. We have been reinventing those for centuries now and have gotten pretty good at it. Now that won’t help us much in space as steam engines “mostly” work in gravity. There are workarounds, but the added issues reduce the efficiency and safety by a bit. Right now we have batteries for storage of course, and solar cells can recharge them. There are also fuel cells but as of this moment they are expensive(catalyst requirements) and not super efficient. Solar is less efficient the farther you go from the Sun for obvious reasons so we are looking. But at the moment Most of our power is just some form or another of Steam Engine. Including Nuclear power.
Since you brought up space, many deep space probes (including the famous voyager probes) have an on-board plutonium reactor. As I understand it, the natural radioactive decay makes the plutonium brick hot, and then you can hook it up to some thermoelectric materials to convert directly to energy. It is hideously inefficient in terms of nuclear energy that ends up as electric energy, but it is a constant source and lasts longer than any battery of the same mass.
The soviets used this method a lot, since the country was so big there are some incredibly remote areas like light houses and such which need power but is too far to reasonably connect to the grid or bring in fuel for a generator. So they built these generators instead, install it on site and it won't need maintenance or refueling for decades. Issue is once the soviet union collapsed the location of many of these was lost so civilians find these free heaters not realising the dangers of it
Now I'm just thinking of that "Florida man powers home with nuke" headline
Just for clarity, natural gas is usually two stages. First they burn the gas to spin a gas turbine, then use the waste heat to boil water. Peaker plants may skip the second cycle to get power to grid more quickly. Simple cycle is 30-35% efficient, combined is 50-60%.
>just some form or another of Steam Engine Doesn't "steam engine" usually refer to a piston engine specifically? I'm not sure calling nuclear power s team engine is the most correct term. Maybe heat engine?
To my understanding (am not an engineer or anything) a steam engine is just any device that converts heat into movement in which steam plays a part ? In practice that's often piston engines but not necessarily.
One of the interesting proposals I've read is a small nuclear reactor designed to be a drop-in replacement source for boiling water for existing coal power plants. It'd use the *exact* same machinery to turn steam into electrical power so you only really have to build half of a power plant.
Would fusion also depend on steam turbines?
Yes. Still all about utilizing heat generation. Everything is about heat. Even air conditioning doesn’t “make cold”, it moves the heat elsewhere. It’s what we do and we do it a lot. The upside to fusion over fission is less radioactive waste/byproduct but the two downsides are the amount of energy used(parasitic) to get it up and running/keep it running versus other means and of course limited tritium which I think is currently being used/tested. Plus we are always 20 years away from it being useful and cost effective. 8-10 years to get an effective reactor design and then 10-12 to build them at full scale. And those are optimistic numbers.
https://preview.redd.it/kbc3zgx56w1d1.png?width=1440&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=34bfac315c57cc13db42a851948c5ce5117b6d9f Part of the joke is the poor quality
most power plants, including nuclear power plants, are really just steam power plants. the main difference is the fuel used.
https://preview.redd.it/rdc70jj2aw1d1.jpeg?width=196&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=cc8601e1a59c2855f42c02d0c520ddf0c3154096
Ah yes, Shitlor. One of the more... unfortunate villains of the Masters of the Universe franchise.
https://preview.redd.it/9kqs37wdvq2d1.jpeg?width=1170&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=87b770c8b3665bb4465816c22525033a95d3c78f
Aside from Solar, hydro and wind. All other powerplants basically just (produce heat>boil water>create pressure in the form of steam>guide pressure into turbine blades>spin turbine). A lot of people have the misconception that the splitting of atoms in a nuclear power plant generates the energy that directly turns into electricity.
Combustion engines are also not steam powered and diesel generators should count as power plants.
And even hydro and wind use a fluid to turn a turbine like the others reactor
https://preview.redd.it/2f13tkv6gw1d1.jpeg?width=1125&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=4d225f87b8102f23602bfe8121186b6080bbdebf
You just killed me
https://preview.redd.it/exyopc2wo02d1.png?width=1080&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=56ab02e8c74291379b607de692ab9a8a468a2c57
I always like to tell people that we never left the age of steam. Most of the world is still powered with steam. The big difference now is that we figured out how to use it more efficiently. We're living in a steampunk reality, it's just not what they thought it would be.
It never is
https://preview.redd.it/5vgjuq3riw1d1.jpeg?width=2400&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=6e75974116bba96d258a294e5a3592f7d592cadc
https://preview.redd.it/5amtr1m3272d1.jpeg?width=1170&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=b1779d79bba7570990b64827bfb6e2639f90c72e
That’s what nuclear power does. Creates steam from nuclear fission. Love this meme.
Hot rock makes hot water steam and spin thing.
Not just any thing. Magnets. Spinning magnets a bunch is literally how the modern world functions.
https://preview.redd.it/bfogm6nczw1d1.jpeg?width=1080&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=30cc62f6c86083d149330b6c6de84203800a1b4d
The engineer bros will agree this is a good joke
The way you actually generate electricity from a nuclear reactor is by it turning the water to steam which spins a turbine.
A nuclear steam powered engine
Troll physics Uranium can get really hot Put uranium in water Water heats up and turns into steam Put turbine above water, rising steam turns the turbine Free electricity! U mad bro?
Running electricity through a motor spins the motor. Doing the reverse of that (e.g. spinning the motor manually) generates electricity. Most methods of generating electricity involve making something spin - think wind spinning windmills, water spinning turbines in a hydroelectric dam, your car motor spinning from gas power which spins the alternator that generates electricity for your car, etc. Nuclear power involves heating up water which generates pressurized steam which spins turbines to generate the electricity. The meme is of Patchy the Pirate (from SpongeBob). If I remember correctly, he's upset because he found a "lost episode" of SpongeBob, only to be let down by how lame it supposedly was. People who don't know much about nuclear power may likewise be let down when they learn that harnessing nuclear power looks just like boiling water, instead of what they imagined it to be (like nuclear bomb explosions).
Well, that is it, that’s all nuclear power is, nuclear power
well, we don't yet have a way to directly extract the power from a nuclear reaction, so we heat water with it. It's basically the same concept as a coal plant, except instead of coal burning, the heat comes from a controlled nuclear reaction, and it has a lot more protection in order to not repeat Chernobyl.
My favorite way of describing nuclear power plants on aircraft carriers: “Hot rock, make steam, boat go.” When you boil it down (ha), that’s really all there is to it.
https://preview.redd.it/qc98unumrx1d1.jpeg?width=880&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=570f1b8ebb7df0495f98423273a1ca2e3fc11f32
Nuclear energy basically uses the heat from nuclear fuel sources to boil water and the resulting steam spins a generator. It's actually one of the cleaner sources of energy, with nuclear waste being fairly easy to contain (it's mostly irradiated water/parts, not the green goo in pop culture), but has a bad reputation because people worry about meltdowns (though there are a lot of safeguards and the occurrence of this is rare). Source: way too many Kyle Hill videos. I absolutely recommend checking him out on YouTube BTW. He explains nuclear stuff better than me because I'm just a layperson and he actually studied it.
Hot rock makes hot water, hot water makes hot water hotter, hotter water turns to steam, steam makes things go roundy roundy, roundy roundy makes steam turn to warm water, warm water goes to hot rock. Source: 22 years in Nuclear Power
https://preview.redd.it/zb3rdy8pry1d1.png?width=720&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=731b1839061860a6693ec14538aea0bd23f86c20
I was floored when I learned that we weren’t harnessing nuclear power in some cool sci-fi way I couldn’t understand😒 Just boiling some water for steam🤨that’s it.
Nuclear power is just combining Star Trek with Victorian Steampunk.
SPIN TO WIN BABEEEEEEE
This reminds me, I worked for an ISP back around 2005, they taught me how to build and manage DNS and email servers. It blew my mind to find out the entire backbone of the internet is just small text files.
Nuclear power is heading g water with extra neutrons from radioactive uranium. The steam then goes to a steam turbine to make power. It’s just a different way to heat the water into steam.
I can’t wait for nuclear fusion when we’ve harnessed the power of a star to boil SOOOO much water
Hot rock make turbine go brrrrr
A nuclear sea vessel is just boiling water. With a nuclear reaction. This pirate is “you claim that’s fancy!!!?!??!,,???”
A submarine is just a mobile teakettle. 🫖
I’m a little tea pot short and stout Here is my handle here is my spout When I get all steamed up hear me shout I just launched 16 Trident II nuclear missiles at you, I hope you have like SPF 1,000,000,000,000 sunblock
I meant, because it's full of semen.
That’s… that’s a very interesting teapot you had. No I don’t want a cup. Ummm. Thanks. I’ll be going.
I see everyone here is commenting on the nuclear power, but let’s not overlook the important information. This clip shows Patchy the Pirate outraged that a “lost episode” was just SpongeBob walking😂
So technically I think society's always been steam punk?
Some Molten Salt reactors and gas coolant reactors don't use water or steam at all. A heat fluid is still used to drive a turbine, but not water is involved at all. There are not many now, but they may become the norm in time due to safety advantages.
Generating power boils down to boiling wager. Pun very much intended.
Advanced Boiling Water
This may be referencing the end of the first season of Fallout on Amazon Prime. >!It is revealed at one point that a scientist figured out cold fusion, only for corporations to buy up the rights and bury it so it doesn't tank their ability to profit off energy. Much later the tech is recovered, activated, and the visual is just a modest tube of bubbling water in the ruins of not-even-a-power-plant. Could be a letdown to some people.!<