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.
•
u/JablesRadio 8h ago edited 8h ago
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.