A place for majestic STEMLORD peacocking, as well as memes about the realities of working in a lab.
Rules
This is a science community. We use the Dawkins definition of meme.
Fun Fact: Since 2006-2007 Uruguay’s power infrastructure has mostly relied on green energy, making up over 90% of their power infrastructure, also making them fully self sustaining power wise
In Canada (2023), renewables make up 66% and nuclear 13% (about 80% together). That's also pretty good.
yeah some countries have that, like sweden and austria. the reason is because they're very mountaineous areas, so there's a lot of water power to harvest. in germany, which is really flat, that would have been impossible with water alone.
fully self sustaining power wise
Damn, imagine that.
Talk about national security.
I had to laugh at this one lol
I watched a docu about one fusion startup in the US. They're skipping the boiling water step and converting the energy directly to electricity.
I dont remember the mechanics of how though. But they reportedly are the closest to net positive.
Helion energy. But i don't think their approach has been verified yet. So take it with a grain of salt.
I didn't know someone was trying a different approach like that, their animated graphics were really cool.
Eventually someone has gotta figure this out, I just hope I'm alive to see it and the outcome of it.
Can we then use that electricity to power a boiler?
It is pretty funny that as advanced as our technology gets, we're still basically just at the higher end of the "steam engine" phase.
I explained this to my oldest when he learned about the steam engine and how cool it was. When I told him it was the peak in power he was like "but we have nuclear and gas" and I told him that nuclear power is basically just a super charged steam engine, and nuclear rods boil water better than coal or gasoline, but it's basically a steam engine. I went over how gasoline in cars was basically the same, but instead of steam, it used tiny explosions. We watched a few how it's made type videos.
Yeah about that.
Those are termosolar powerplant, they use the sun to boil water and spin a turbine.
Its even more metal they heat salt that heats water to spin the turbine. This keeps the power generation well after sun down.
That's what they want you to think. I bet it also powers a secret orbital space laser. I should know, a man with a theoretical degree in physics told me.
Now we just need solar boilers.
To boil water.
Driving by the one in California was always a trip. You could see the lines of sunlight being reflected from the mirrors in the air; it was so bright.
china already have a supercritical carbon dioxide system integrated into a functioning powergrid and operating commercially. The system exploits an exotic phase of co2 which expands to fill a volume like gas, but moves frictionlessly through tubes as a liquid. Their are concerns about lifespan because of how caustic the system is, but apparently some new materials are being trialled which negate this.
People are essentially internal combustion engines that burn food. Trying to capture that energy in ways that increases the load on us just causes us to need more calories. That's counter productive as you could just burn said food itself to get energy, and agriculture is an energy and environmentally intensive industry to begin with.
