- cross-posted to:
- science_memes@mander.xyz
- cross-posted to:
- science_memes@mander.xyz
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i’m willing to have fizzle reactors on the moon. and mars. but i am not willing to shoot the fizzle materials via rockets to the moon or mars because of rockets tendency to blow up when designed and built by the humans.
i want no earth fizzle.
Chernobyl could have been so much worse.
Considering the unregulated capitalist hell scale we live in, I can’t trust that some mega corp wouldn’t cut corners.
Until you run out of that fissile material when you could just be using renewable energy…
I see all these pictures where the steam seemingly just escapes into the atmosphere.
Are there any designs where the cooling steam condenses and then pools and falls back down as liquid to turn even more turbines via gravity like hydroelectrics dams and then returns to the source pool to be reheated by the nuclear materials?
That’s not how modern power plants work. It’s not an open loop to the cooling tower, instead you have a closed loop that gets superheated under high pressure and runs the turbines, but needs to get cooled down before the loop can start over. You cool it down by running the pipes through other water, which evaporated in a cooling tower. The evaporated water takes the heat out of the system, if you returned it to the loop, the system would overheat
Ooooo That’s a neat concept
Somone send this to Remi
I’ve always found it slightly funny that nuclear power is technically just a fancy steam engine.
Almost all power source that generate electricity are fancy steam engines.
Wait, it’s all steam engines?
🔫 👩🚀🔫👩🚀 always has been
Never got this meme honestly, I should figure it out sometime 🔫🧑🚀🔫🧑🚀
What?!? It was always just a meme?!?
I thought it was a reference I didn’t get because I’m an old.
Always has been 👩🚀🔫👩🚀.
But actually that article is pretty thin. I believe it was originally a joke about how many astronauts are from Ohio, so they’d get to space and it would turn out the whole planet was Ohio. It is in fact a reference to real world thing, it’s just a very obscure and absurd reference.
Hydro, wind, solar, and wave/tide energy capture are not.
The crazy part is photovoltaics are the only power source that doesn’t spin something to make electricity. Truly an outlier.
There’s one more outlier though which is Electrochemical cell, like galvanic element or voltaic pile
It was used around 1800 as a major electricity source, but I guess it quickly became uneconomical in 1866 or sth when the dynamo was invented.
Edit: wait yes, it actually says this in the second paragraph of the linked article:
The entire 19th-century electrical industry was powered by batteries related to Volta’s (e.g. the Daniell cell and Grove cell) until the advent of the dynamo (the electrical generator) in the 1870s.
Great call! Completely forgot about batteries and potato power sources!
solar
Except the ones that are. (Concentrated solar power)
…and the fancy steam engine version of solar is probably greener to build that photovoltaics, since it’s basically just a boiler and some mirrors.
Internal combustion engine based generators aren’t fancy steam engines either - however, they have a lot in common still. It’s still just a way to move around the spinny bits of an alternator/generator/dynamo/whatever
Not entirely true, there is the thermoelectric generator too. Though it’s not very practical
Which requires them to output DC rather than AC, so they require inverters to change it to AC. It’s handier for battery storage though.
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Hydro is the most fancy steam engine since it waits for the water to recondense to make power.
Condensed steam.
Has anyone tried using cold steam yet?
Scientists are twenty years away from cold steam power generation
Wait so does that make wind power more or less fancy than hydro?
Air is a fluid, it’s hydrodynamics all the way down.
Everything is a fluid. Sand is a fluid. Sand and water? Only sometimes.
Edit: this was not on topic, I just got mad at my old physics teacher for a second and channeled 16 year old me, sorry
It’s cool. I get why it’s easy to see the universe as various fluids. We are
Depends on the humidity
Photovoltaics have left the chat.
Piezoelectrics have left the chat
Well, wins turbines too
I never understood that either. It seems like the steam production is an extra step.
So my general understanding is that you can use a magnet to create an electrical current. Its like it pushes the electrons, like a paddle pushing water. So they coil a bunch of wire around a magnet and rotate the magnet, which moves the electrons in the wire and that gets you electrical power. But you need something to push that magnet around, so you attach that to a big ass fan and use steam to push the fan. That’s your turbine. Nuclear power is just using a hot rock to make the steam. Hydroelectric power uses a river to push the turbine. Wind power is doing the same thing, just uhhh, with wind.
Jesus christ this comment deserves a noble prize. Incredibly succinct explanation of something I didn’t get before.
Honestly, fantastic explanation!
It’s pretty much the only pathway to make heat spin a turbine.
Well, efficiently, at least.
You can always heat up a hot air balloon and have it yank a system of pulleys, but you’re gonna lose a lot of energy that way.
Turning heat into mechanical or chemical or electric energy directly is really hard, you know.
It’s funny that you can get more energy from gas by using it to heat water and using a steam turbine to drive whatever. It’s just not always practical.
I’m not really sure how else you’d do it. The energy we can get out of fission is in the form of heat, and steam isn’t as compressible as just gas and it’s easy to make with just heat. Combine that with electromagnetism giving you electricity by spinning some magnets around some coils, and there you go.
It’s probably possible to get some air hot enough and do some fancy convection work to get it to spin a rotor, but that’s going to be really inefficient.
You could also use the heat to make materials glow and put a solar panel nearby, but that’s also going to be pretty inefficient.
Get beta radiation and then put the electrons directly into the wires.
One by one.
Artisanal, hand wrought electricity.
It’s just taking advantage of the change in matter state. H2O expands ~16,000 times it’s size when it boils from liquid water to gaseous steam. That increase in size means it wants to go somewhere else, we just control where it goes and it’s relief valve happens to be going through a spinning wheel with magnets on it, inducing currents in the coils of wire around the wheel.
Yes it’s way more complicated than that, but it’s the best way we have of turning heat into electricity, so it’s what we use. With the primary exception of solar, nearly every form of power production is using heat energy to indirectly spin a wheel.
I swear Nuclear Reactors were designed by a chemist with a grudge against a physicist and engineer.
Run low on water, stop reaction. Fission products keep getting hot even though reaction stopped. Not enough water to cool them off. Shit.
That’s why you have a closed water system and multiple failsaves.
Unless you want to cyka your last blyat.
What do I need to roll to pass the failsaves?
Roll yourself up in a blanket of lead and concrete
This scene was really outstanding
What’s that from?
The Chernobyl miniseries on HBO. It’s a great watch!
Ah, thanks. I’ll check it out.
thankfully modern ones like molten salt reactors have passive safety, where they stop the reaction if overheating occurs.
edit: My mistake, there’s no active commercial molten salt reactors.
But nuclear power is very safe nowadays because of the multiple fail-safes, which some can still be passive like emergency cooling.
I much rather get electricity from magic rocks than destroying rain forest in developing countries drilling oil, gas or mining coal.
The biggest risk in nuclear is environmental disasters like in Fukushima’s case, which is the last significant nuclear incident in past 13 yearsAnd are those modern molten salt reactors in the room with us now?
2 MW. Fantastic. And only 8 years until it reaches continuous operation. How long will it be before that is anywhere near utility scale?
Ah yes, the passive safety of the molten salt spontaneously catching on fire when in contact with air and can’t be put out with water.
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You can’t stop decay heat. It’s just molton salt reactors can operate at much higher temperatures and if it loses active cooling passive cooling with just air and infrared radiation while the salt passively circulates could be enough.
Isn’t molten salt just energy storage? Heat up salt when you have excess of energy, take heat out when you need it. The worst disaster there is just the container melting.
No, there are molten salt thermal batteries, but they aren’t the same as molten salt nuclear reactor. In a nuclear reactor the fissile material is dissolved in the salt for some reason, and the molten salt acts as a moderator or something. Apparently its safe because if the reactor power fails, the salt ‘freezes’ which prevents fission from occurring. Seems like complex extra steps to me but what do I know.
“Can’t have a meltdown when you’ve already melted the fuel” is pretty much the whole idea there.
MSRs have negative temperature reactivity coefficient and outlet temps around 700C at atm pressure. PWR is at measly 300C and 150 Bar.
If all control is lost, the salt expands as it heats up pushing the expanded volume out from the reactor core. The fission stops once the fuel is leaves the core region where the moderator is. Reverse is also true: you pull heat off from the loop, so the fuel-salt becomes denser, increasing reactivity. MSRs can naturally “follow” the load, if done right.
there’s no active commercial molten salt reactors.
Experimental ones were all shut down within 5-10 years because corrosion makes them uneconomical to repair.
Fukushima’s case, which is the last significant nuclear incident in past 13 years
Zaporizhzhia (shutdown with IAEA concerns but may not fully report any emission releases) in Ukraine has military attacks against it, with intent of fundraising and politically blaming a disaster on the side that weapons providers, and the media they own, love to hate. Our media normalizes civil war as a response to Netanyahu not having his favorite ruler appointed.
Thorium Thorium Thorium Thorium Thorium
Uranium it is, then!
Turn water back on suddenly and realize what happens when water touches an object many times warmer than it’s boiling point.
Just throw some sand and boron on it, she’ll be right mate.
Same applies to geothermal.
lava is really hot
use lava to boil water
use steam to turn a generator
free electricity!
Have we still not been able to progress past all power generation being “use water to turn a generator”? Humanity figured out the water wheel then just kept making it more complex.
How about “use air to turn a generator”? Now that’s original. Or photovoltaics, I guess.
So I’ve tried starting a perpetual windmill and it made money on only fans but it turned out the be an electrical loss overall… Had to abandon that attempt, back to the drawling board, I think I messed up somewhere.
You know that windmills are kind of the opposite of fans? Try “only windmills” instead and it’s not a
:.|:;anymoreSo I reversed the windmill to a helicopter, more views, still an overall electrical loss. Thanks for trying though. I might not be the best person for this job.
Guess I should start scouting for talent
We have! Thermoelectric generators that make electricity directly from heat exist, they’re just often not very good compared to the spinny wheel.
We even use them to make nuclear reactors with no moving parts, which I think is really neat. They’re used in places where maintenance or refueling is difficult or impossible, like space probes.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioisotope_thermoelectric_generator
What about a piss wheel instead of a water wheel?
Chat is this legit gameplay or an exploit?
Trolls and exploiters at it again. If god intended for us to make nuclear energy then he would’ve made it appear in nature. Stupid scientists making stuff from gods creation.
Well do I have news for you
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_nuclear_fission_reactor
Well but they’re not around anymore because the uranium inside them is all consumed by now, right?
Uranium is still there, it’s just sub-critical mass so the reaction isn’t happening. Uranium 235 (which would have powered the reaction) has a half life of ~700 million years. So there’s still probably a good bit of it there - the reaction is thought to have stopped about 1.7 billion years ago.
that makes sense, yeah
The Sun
that’s fusion, not fission
He said nuclear not specifically fission
ok
Exactly
Is just trolling.
I love these, there’s no way that would ever work
free
The only completed attempt in last 25 years in US (Vogtle), cost over $15/watt. Before fuel, operations, security, waste disposal plan, and no insurance.
Turnkey (containers full of batteries) systems in China are under $100/kwh. A possible imported cost of $100/kwh.
5gw of solar and 19gwh batteries would have higher capacity factor than nuclear, use same transmission infrastructure size, and cost $7/watt. Where winter production is not enough to fill batteries, the batteries can still be charged by wind or peaker plants that can run a bit more efficiently for a continuous time over a day instead of in bursts.
Disclaimer: I am a nitpicker, so apologies for this.
I do believe the symbol of the watt should be capitalized: W. Also the SI prefix giga, G. So that would be kWh, GWh, etc.
TBF 90% of the cost of nuclear in the US is political resistance. Not engry meeting
100% of nuclear funding is political bribery. It is unbankable and uninsurable. Through bribery, cost+ funding can be obtained. More bribes = more covering of cost and time overruns.
If what you mean by “political resistance” is that bigger bribes are needed to overcome unpopularity, that is a tiny fraction of the bribery amount. Elected officials do blatantly destructive and unpopular acts all the time. The rate of approvals has little to do with project costs once approved.
Got any proof of big nuclear meddling
Ohio corruption scandal was over nuclear industry bribes. All nuclear projects are publicly funded, and because they are categorically uneconomical, and delay any impact on global warming for 15 years, they are lobbied for by fossil fuel competitors. Boondoggles based on disinformation necessarily require political body to be corrupt and in on it, rather than just stupid.
That’s pretty bad and undeniable. Does this account for all nuclear funding though?
Having no economic value does mean only corruption pretends nuclear energy to have economic value. Another dishonest, but bribed by defense instead of utility operator, motive is weapons.
There is an honest exception of a small town in Arizona (lack of water). They admit their power project costs are astronomical for nuclear compared to solar alternative, but the permanent jobs provided by a nuclear plant raise property values and taxes a bit. This too, no matter how honest the motives, is corruption in obtaining other people’s money to finance a project for local jobs and property values.
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EZ It’s not rocket science
Love my big pot of spicy water.
don’t drink the spicy soup!
Coming up, troll physics explains rocket science.
Would read
Got you fam
Step 1 put liquid in mouth
Step 2 spit liquid fast
Go to step 1
Plot twist: In the original timeline, nuclear power generation didnt exist. Some time in the future, OP will become a time traveller and end up getting stuck in the past and therefore brining this idea to fruition, which is why we are on this timeline.
(OP, got any aspirations got being a time traveler yet? Come on, ya gotta complete the time loop.)
I would hazard a guess that it ain’t work like that.
You need a moderator to facilitate a slow fisson reaction. Some of the produced neutrons have misfit speed to create another fisson reaction.
Also note that fissile and radioactive is not the same, but you used them correctly.
no it works exactly like that, I have 200 nuclear reactors in my backyard
Why use 200 small reactors in the ground when you can use one really big one in the sky?
David Hahn? What are you doing on Lemmy? I thought you died!
Atom floats on atom
Jokes on you, this is what humanity has been doing for years. I have one at home as well.
