if its just water boiling in a pot,can you just put a Turbine above the pot and use the steam to spin the Turbine?
this post was submitted on 03 Apr 2026
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ACTUALLY ITS BOILING SODIUM!!… ~which then gets used to boil water~
I love that deep down, coal, gas, nuclear, this thing… all done to heat water, make steam, use steam to turn turbines…. We are just in a steampunk universe
Always has been.
Solar panel projects, which many have outstripped this and other projects in power limitations, do not boil water to generate electricity.
And wind turbines, and hydroelectric plants.
But all but solar cells are pretty much turbines all the way down
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It turns out boiling water is a really good idea.
Especially when you make a good cuppa with it.
There are a lot of options, but water works, is cheap as hell, and spills aren't much of an issue.
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It's so crazy that we've found like six different ways to use rocks to boil water. You'd think there'd just be two or three
I'm gonna need help identifying all of them. So far I have burn them, smush glowing ones together, and reflect radiation with them.
- Coal. Set it on fire, use fire to boil water
- Geothermal. Go down where the rocks are hot, use hot rocks to boil water.
- Nuclear. Magic rocks get hot all by themselves. Use them to boil water.
- Photovoltaics. Shape rocks into solar panels, use solar panels to power stove to boil water.
- Concentrated solar. Use mirrors to reflect sunlight onto salt (a rock). Boil water with hot salt.
- Put water in a glass tube. Use mercury (a rock) to draw a vacuum. Water boils at room temp under a vacuum.
- Lob a space rock at the planet. Space rock vaporizes everything in a 100 mile radius, including water.
I'm sure we can think of more
Dam. Stack rocks to block water, use leaking water to turn propeller.
Ohhh right that makes sense. I was only thinking of ways to use rocks to boil water to make electricity. So I missed geothermal and disregarded photovoltaics.
Are we against boiling water only because it is old? Because if that is the only problem and we are ok with reliability and efficiency than i will take old
It's more that when you look at history and technological progress, and our (millenial's) own view on technological progress, the current stagnation and the permeation of said stagnation is a pain point. Every time we look at the news, it's something going fucking wrong, and never delivering on the promise of a better , brighter future.
We saw computers go from 100s of Mhz to 3 ghz ish and just get fucking stuck there. From 16 meg to 64 gigs, and now we can't buy any ram. We had touch interfaces being able to show you an arbitary interface and instead of innovation, we got swiping through stupid videos. We look through the history we didn't live through, and see that in the 20th century, we went through flight and rockets to the fucking moon and then nothing. We have a rocket going to the moon with people in it again for the first time since the 70s, and they aren't even doing anything new, just flying around. We expected there to be fucking bases on MARS by the time we got to the distant year of TWO THOUSAND AND TWENTY SIX.
Even now, when we're coming to harvesting power from the sun, in a seemingly new way (focusing it with mirrors onto salt) it's just going to be the same shit, nothing new, no innovation. Just put the hot rock into water, and harvest it through steam power as if it's the fucking 1800s.
Also, it has a light relation to the evolution inevitably creating crabs once again meme of Carcinisation.
Great comment!
I'm optimistic in the space of biology and biotechnology though. People are doing actual SciFi shit right now. We've got CAR-T tech, CRISPR that's trivial to deploy, monoclonal antibodies, mRNA tech, microbiome science, DNA sequencing that is mind-blowingly good, large scale computational analysis and machine learning that's decoding the noise of our genomes, rapid detection of pathogens with a MALDI-TOF, to just name a few.
It's an insane time in biology right now, and it's the current frontier along with computer science/ML.
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Its more a commentary that most "new electricity source!!! Amazing!" Is a heat source thats boiling water to turbines which isnt a new method, its a new source of heat. So more a complaint about sensational headlines about electricity
Never sell proven chemistry or physics short. Water transforming to a vapor is awesome. Maybe we could harness the energy of water transforming to a solid too.
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Oh neat like the ones outside Vegas, I always wonder if birds fly into the center
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Physicists just looove a hot shower
That's the reason why all electricity generation boils down to hot water.
What's the worst that could happen?
Supercritical CO2 gas turbines are also a possibility.
It's incredibly silly that even tho we advance the scale of power, with electricity, solar and even nuclear, all we use it is to boil water. We just can't seem to be able t build any a more advanced mechanism, it seems.
Hard to beat spinning a magnet to generate electricity, and it's hard to beat boiling water to spin a magnet
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Well molten salt batteries are a thing, I'm presuming this is to buffer the output of the solar and that the losses were deemed acceptable given the renewable nature of this.
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Turbine go brr
They have (had?) these across the California border from Vegas. Bright as fuck, you could see them dozens of miles away when flying in on a plane, but couldn't look directly at them.
Ivanpah Solar Power Facility and the Crescent Dunes Solar Energy Project.
Looks like the first is still producing power, but the electricity being generated ended up being much costlier than photovoltaic panels (since they didn't anticipate they would become so cheap back when it was being constructed) and the people running it want to shut it down. And the latter was shut down after the company went bankrupt twice.
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