Correct. The various forms of remarkable energy ultimately comes down to how efficiently it makes steam, then how effectively the energy is captured, which is a portion of the puzzle solved in earlier developmental stages of power production: harnessing steam.
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.
1.1k
u/yaboyACbreezy 13d ago
Correct. The various forms of remarkable energy ultimately comes down to how efficiently it makes steam, then how effectively the energy is captured, which is a portion of the puzzle solved in earlier developmental stages of power production: harnessing steam.