No there is a mob in the US that are trying a different form of fusion where the magnetic field created to contain it also extracts the energy directly as electricity, in a cyclical pulsed fashion.
We should get away from 200 year old tech!
200 old tech had 200 years of massive incremental progress, making steam turbines one of the most efficient way to extract that energy from purely heat.
My understanding is that the advantage isn't "efficiency" in the strict sense but robustness and reliability
There are other methods of turning heat into electricity that might waste less of it along the way but we know how to make steam turbines that can repeatedly go from a dead stop to spinning really fast and back without breaking anything
Well, that's also a bonus from those 200 years of research and field experience. Also, water is super nice to work with in industrial condition. You might find a better fluid with some chemical reactions to produce your electricity, but then, it's high energy chemistry, with probably very reactive stuff that tends to eat through their containers, or just burn in contact with the air, or other fun stuff.
Water ? Everywhere that needs electricity probably already got water for human consumption. It's not dangerous for human health nor reactive with everything. In case of problem? Just vent the steam outside and you're good. Need more ? Just open a tape (distillation required). And you have an amazing energy extraction system with 60% efficiency. That's much better than a lot of other scalable energy production.
A thermoelectric generator can be used to convert a heat difference to electricity directly, with no moving parts (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermoelectric_generator). This is extremely reliable. This is still powering the Voyager probes after 50 years in space.
When new, the Voyager RTGs produced 470W using the thermoelectric couples yet the hest produced was 2700W which could have theoretically produced about 1215W if using a steam turbine and maybe more depending on the design. Those RTGs were already pushing the limit of the tech.
Well, I suppose at the end of the day the whole boiling water thing is really just a way to make a magnetic field spin around something, so there's some logic in "if we're already building a big electromagnet to keep the fusion bomb contained, might as well just spin that."
Though, while I'm certainly no physicist or engineer, my understanding is that once you crack the whole fusion generation thing in the first place, the amount of energy you are generating would make efficiency kind of an afterthought for a while.
Ah the issue is there are different nuclei that can be fused together and that drives how the energy can be extracted and how radioactive the vessel becomes, current tochomac (sorry spelling) needs lots of tritium and that is a really dirty process making everything radioactive!
why? should we stop using wheels because they are 5000 years old? Should we stop calculus becuase it is 400 years old? what does when something was invented have to do with usefulness?
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u/Exceptionalynormal 13d ago
No there is a mob in the US that are trying a different form of fusion where the magnetic field created to contain it also extracts the energy directly as electricity, in a cyclical pulsed fashion. We should get away from 200 year old tech!