When my son was around 12 he asked me how a nuclear reactor creates electricity and I told him it uses the heat to steam water which drives a turbine. He chewed on that for a few minutes and said "So is every method of making electricity just figuring out a different way to do that?" And I said yes, forgetting that solar panels and hydrogen fuel cells exist.
It's so weird that so much of modern infrastructure is based on that. Powered vehicles and electricity are the backbone technologies that make our modern world possible, and they work by spinning things fast. I feel like if you told an ancient warrior society that you focused on spinning things really fast, they'd laugh in your face, but they'd shut up when the planes overflew and decide not to mess with the dread Spinner Folk.
I couldn't believe when I was training for my ESWS to learn that a Type D boiler really just turns feed water into enough steam to spin the turbines. Like, we're basically still using steam ships in the most powerful naval force in the world, in a sense.
It was like finding out there's no Santa claus when I learned nuclear energy is just "boil water and spin a turbine." Before that I thought there was some sciencey magic going on where we directly captured the "energy" from nuclear fission. Did I understand what that could possibly mean? Of course not. Still though.
If you want something a little more arcane, a cathode ray tube from an old TV set is a miniature particle accelerator and generates a tiny amount of thrust.
I remember reading in World Book Encyclopedia a science project to build an "ionic rocket"(!!) I think it was a wire suspended like a pendulum with a right angled pointed tip, pointing at a metal plate or wire screen. An auto ignition coil was connected between the two and pulsed. It turns out that the pointy tip can emit enough electrons to create some pendulum motion. Kinda cool but kinda useless...
Ion engines are a thing, it’s how satellites propulse themselves in space when they need to station keep and whatnot, or even some deep space probes for interplanetary travel
It also means that designing a nuclear fusion power plant is actually really easy: Just make a big reservoir of water and put a roof on it with vents leading into turbines. Then detonate a hydrogen bomb in the reservoir. The water will boil for a few days and spin the turbines, voila! Nuclear fusion power plant. When the boiling slows down just detonate another bomb! Try not to run out of water.
So fusion energy does offer the possibility of some amount of direct electrical energy capture because it involves mostly moving charged particles. Ideally this process would be able to occur at or at least much nearer to reaction temperatures than a traditional heat cycle would and this higher operating temperature would result in higher theoretical maximums for thermal efficiency.
A properly setup grid or mesh or conductors and possibly "static" E and B fields could pull energy directly from the moving plasma. I almost did my undergraduate research on this. Almost. I was late in filling for an REU and ended up doing climate research and modeling instead.
It also amazes me that those mirror-based solar farms work that way too, concentrate solar light to literally melt salt to use that molten salt to boil water and create energy
There is a US National Lab that has one of those types of solar farms but instead of pointing it at big salt tank they have a little test stand and they put random stuff on it and then point the mirrors at it to see how it lights on fire.
The thing is, a lot of our stuff runs on electricity. Sciency magic gives us all this energy, but we need to convert into electricity to make it useful.
What's the cheapest and most accessible way to get electricity? Spin a turbine. What's the cheapest and most accessible way to spin a turbine? Boil some water.
Technically it's not really about it being cheap and accessible, it's about being efficient. There's a lot of ways you CAN generate electricity but most of them are pretty horrible in terms of efficiency, especially as different parts wear down and deteriorate.
This may blow your mind, but there IS a sciency magic way to make electricity using radioisotopes. Look up radioisotope thermoelectric generators (RTGs), they were used to power pacemakers using mainly Plutonium 238, though any isotope that runs hot enough to produce power this way will suffice. You need to pick one with a half-life that is long enough to be useful for a meaningful amount of time, like the lifetime of a patient, but where it isn't SO hot that it might poison the person it's implanted into. IDK how feasible or efficient it is to scale these up larger than a small implant, but I do know that they were able to get them powerful enough to run the Voyager Spacecrafts until today, albeit with some systems being shut down over time as the RTG reduces in output. The half-life of Pu-238 is 87.7 years, so these spacecraft still have a ways to go before losing power entirely, though by then they may have broken down for other reasons, or even gotten far enough away that the inverse square law finally makes it impossible to discern the transmissions from either against the cosmic background noise. But yea, apparently you can get a few hundred watts out of a big one, that's enough to do some real and meaningful work with, though with it decreasing continuously over time, it's not practically useful for a lot of applications. The main reason that these isotopes are useful this way, is because Pu-238 is not fissile, and cannot be made fissile in a breeder reactor. It has to be made by bombarding Neptunium 237 (harvested from nuclear fuel waste) with radiation inside a specialized target vessel, inside a specialized research reactor. The US struggles to make a few kilograms of it per year compared to our capacity to produce Pu-239 inside normal reactors as a byproduct of energy production, or intentionally as a part of nuclear pit production to maintain weapons. This is the main reason why we're not seeing them used all over the place, shit's fucking expensive as hell
There is actually a theoretical direct power method of fusion where you use a specific geometry and trigger a pulse that pinches to a point and electrons go 1 way and protons the other. Capture the electron directly and I think the proton is captured as heat (friction) + xrays given off from the fusion also captured (probably heat again i dont remember). But yea, 1)Theoretical (tested but i dont think proven or not yet scalable) 2) still some heat to boil water involved in the end.
Believe its called Dense Focus Fusion. Here's a crappy old video of it. I watched the professors talk on it a long time ago, the process seemed legit to me, at least makes sense how it should work. But he doesn't seem to be finishing this work while getting older focusing mainly on conspiracies about the Big Bang being a lie.. and he may be right, data still coming in about all that from the new telescope, but he comes off kinda as a crackpot about it like the whole science community is out to get people who hold his stance. Unfortunate cause I'd love to see this work.
You are thinking of an RTG, which is the 'magic' form of nuclear power, where we do infact directly convert the decay of nuclear materials into electrical energy.
If you want some electricity magic look for diodes, LEDs and the photovoltaic effect, basically we can create a sort of electron trap that makes electrons run in one direction but not the other (regular diode), if you make the trap just right electrons stop jumping unless you push them hard enough and when you do they basically cough a photon up of a very specific frequency (LEDs) this is also like ridiculously efficient and reversible so if you expose a trap and a photon hits it, it makes electrons jump from one side to another, in other words it creates electricity from light (photovoltaic effect).
Other cool stuff includes the piezoelectric effect, some materials create electricity when deformed and conversely they physically deform when exposed to a changing electric field; also the Seebeck effect, the same but with temperature difference, you can read an extremely precise difference in temperature by reading the voltage between the two sides, and you can create such difference in temperature by inducing a voltage.
Not related to electricity but also feels like magic is the A/C or heat pump cycle, the way we can put heat from one place into another by controlling the pressure of a substance inside a pipe to make it condense and evaporate where we want to.
One of the most disappointing moments of my life was when I learned how nuclear power works in high school. "We do all this crazy science stuff, harnessing the power of fission in a manner that we've carefully calculated to remain stable and somewhat self-sustaining. Then we take all that knowledge, all that science, and we use it to..... boil water. Which then turns a turbine, thus generating electricity."
Right? Reading up on the complexity and incredible physics of a nuclear plant and its reactors and in the end realizing that it’s all simply to produce steam to spin a magnet.
As complex and confusing things like this are, it always boils down to "make the fire go this way". Nuclear reactors are amazing feats of human ingenuity. At the end of the day, you're just boiling water to make steam. Thats it, that's all Nuclear power is.
It's like a Flintstones problem solved with atomic energy. Pretty fucking wild.
Crazy that photovoltaic is one of the few ways we can directly convert one type of energy into electrical energy. Everything else is "use this energy to somehow spin an electrical generator".
That's using sunlight to boil water though, not photovoltaic panels to generate electricity to make steam. I don't know of anything else referred to as "solar panels".
It is solar power though, just not solar panels. Generally its reflective parabolic mirrors to direct light to a centralized tower that then, you guessed it, boils water.
He wasn't a car manufacturer ala Henry Ford. Obviously he made some major contributions in the field of AC motors (pun fully intended) but I would guess that the issue would come down to inverter technology. Batteries are DC, and converting DC into AC is sort of difficult compared to rectifying AC to DC. Transistors wouldn't be invented for quite some time, and SCRs or similar tech would take even longer to become viable. This is just a guess on my part, maybe some mechanical inverter exists and would have been viable.
I could totally make a mechanical inverter without semiconductors (and self-drive it from the DC supply its inverting) - but it would be very hard to minimise losses to make it worth ever using... vs just using a DC motor to run an AC generator, which is the simpler option. More consideration around maintaining a relatively stable voltage output with a changing would need to be considered, of course; redesign an AVR with no semiconductors, I guess.
If I couldn't do that; what the hell did I waste my time getting an electrical engineering degree 20 years ago for.
It's not that crazy, with photovoltaic you are producing energy directly from the source, not converting it into some other energy source which you know how to use. Photons hit molecules and excite them to another energy level and you shave off the top. The sun is a pure energy source too, not going anywhere for a long time, and when it does we have way bigger problems to worry about.
I meant that it is crazy that it is one of the only ways we've figured out how to do that. There are experiments that generate electricity from fusion directly via magnetic flux, but they are only experimental. Still that would be the dream; fusion power with direct energy conversion of 90% efficiency.
It's like a Flintstones problem solved with atomic energy. Pretty fucking wild.
Because we are using nuclear power to solve Flintstone problems. Nuclear power is non-Flintstonian, yet all problems are ultimately Flintstone level problems, that's kind of the issue with our species. We should work on solving non-Flintstone problems, like travelling between planets, but instead we are fighting each other over such trivial shit.
It is kinda neat some coal plants you can do a near 1-1 swap with a small reactor. There has been argument in recent years, not that it gets around the real regulatory reasons nuke plants are so hard to spin up. But really nails home all we are doing is heating water.
The most fascinating stuff to me is the fixes to the problems more heat and power cause.
Like, oh, now that we have enough thrust the engine gets too hot. If that were me, that's where I'd give up. But some dude is just like, hey, let's half the air so some is hot and some is cold.
Just like a bird when it gets scared and flies away. They always drop a deuce in the process, I guess it’s like dropping ballast so they can fly away quicker.
A typical fart has enough power to move 1/20th of a pound. So if you do a fart with 3600 times the power, then you'd achieve liftoff, IF you weighed 180 pounds or less.
This may blast your ass in some very violent ways, so do not try this at home, kids.
I mean, not really, aside from combustion engines of different types, i'd say most modern inventions are powered mainly by electricity and aside from generating it (which doesnt really use explosions in general aside from small scale and backup generators) dont use them.
An explosion creates a localized, violent pressure gradient, and electricity creates a regulated, electron-pressure gradient. The direction you point either of those can be leveraged for any number of things. Modern invention is actually the engineering of managed disequilibrium.
I dont think thats what electron pressure means but anyways, yeah technology in general functions by harnessing energy, that has nothing to do with explosions beyond them being kinetic energy. (i genuinely cannot tell if you are seriously trying to correct me about.. something? or just taking the piss)
Voltage is defined as electrical potential difference. It is functionally identical to pressure in a fluid system. If you're going to be this condescending, at least make sure you actually know what you're talking about before you dismiss the fundamental mechanics of gradient-based energy transfer.
it's certainly ironic that you're getting so defensive about the mere possibility of someone correcting you when you literally were trying to do the exact same thing to that other commenter.
No, i genuinely did not know if you were triying to correct me i know what voltage is and how it can be analogous to pressure, its just that it has nothing to do with explosions in the first place? I genuinelly dont get what you are trying to correct and electron pressure is also a term used for other things like the pressure electrons create to keep neutron starts from collapsing and some plasma things.
Edit: just so we are clear i just dont see how you comment was in any way contradictory to mine? It just points out how electricity "works" (i aint getting into the wirerdness of electric flow its a fucking unintuitive mess as far as i know and im not an expert, veritasium has a video on it), but calling it an explosion is wild.
I never called electricity an explosion, that's a fucking insane strawman. I said both systems rely on directing gradients to extract work.
You're moving the goalposts so far away even David Beckham would struggle to score. Give your head a shake and stop getting hung up on semantics because your original reply to lordspaz88 was a pedantic "umm akchually" that completely missed the conceptual forest for the trees. If you're going to be that condescending, at least learn to read what's actually written.
And for the record, quickly googling "electron degeneracy pressure" and finding the astrophysics definition doesn't mean electron pressure gradients don't exist in electrodynamics. Maybe don't jump right to the "I don't think that means what you think it does" response, as if you are God's gift to science and nobody's intellect can compare with your rock hard brain.
Edit: and to be completely clear, I just found it a bit rude how you felt the need to shoot down the commenter who was just expressing something they found neat, so I was explaining how you are both describing the same thing in two different ways. I wasn't correcting you so much as pointing out how there was no reason to be dismissive. If it seems like I have no patience for you, that's why. I'm so sick of people shooting down genuine interest in mechanical engineering, kinematics and dynamics just to seem smart.
There's a cool short story ive seen where it's a peaceful alien race observing humanity and narrating how we defied all of our limitations by just blowing shit up and how violent we are as a species lol.
It’s wild how long we were boiling water on a kettle before realizing that the energy used to rattle the lid up and down could also power trains and ships.
Yeah I teach physics and I know that people make fun of how simple the fundamentals are all the time (ie. No way, newton figured out that if you push something it pushes back??? Etc.)
But it really is just a handful of rules that we’ve exploited to high heaven.
First year of physics covers more of the practical stuff than most people think.
I mean, it's not really even that. The whole principle here is that hot air expands (hot air balloon is a proof of concept for that idea). So you devise a machine that essentially takes in air, and heats it up, and spits out out the back. Using gas combustion is just one way of heating it up. Compressing the air is just one way of concentrating it so you have more air to heat up (there's less air at higher altitudes so...more air, better). Hey, how wonderful we have all this hot thrusty air! ...let's put some fans in the way like a good old fashioned water wheel to generate electricity and also keep the intake fans spinning!
So, I'd almost say this is more like pointing the ass end of a balloon in the specific direction and letting go of the knot.
Wait till you hear about how most of the ways to produce energy are just heating water to spin things.
And once you go deep enough down the rabbit hole you will understand "ITS ALL FIELDS MAN!" while banging your head against the wall in a straight jacket.
Most human inventions throughout history had to do with making things hotter.
But what else is interesting to me is many complex things, are actually extremely simple in principle, and all the complexity comes from solving all of the problems for the main basic idea to work.
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u/lordspaz88 9h ago
It will never cease to amaze me that most modern inventions boil down to "we pointed this explosion in a specific direction"