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I love how fucking biased that article is. It mentions Obama like 10 times, including this gem:
Clearly, the Obama administration decided to spend taxpayer funds on a technology that was poorly conceived and quickly outdated.
Thanks for the hindsight, moron writer guy. So what’s trump doing, investing in better renewables?
No, instead of building an underperforming power plant, he spent the same money just to prevent a power plant from being built.
Money for nothing and the chicks for free amirite.
What? Hydroelectric power stations use gravity and the falling or flowing water makes the turbines turn. No steam.
Thermal plants (nuclear, coal, gas), including solar thermal plants, use steam.
True, but that’s just one part of the process, and it’s not comparing to the initial energy in the source fuel.
If nothing else, there’s an absolute efficiency limit from Carnot’s theorem, but in reality it’s much lower, even for the most modern and efficient gas plants, the limit seems to be ~60%, and for nuclear or coal, it’s even lower at around 30-40%.
I call it Bytejunkium, but I don’t think it catched on.
I’m not disputing what the current gold standard is, I’m looking for theoretical possibilities.
When you say heat, in fusion, most of the energy would be a neutron moving really fast, right? It sucks that it doesn’t have a charge because then it would be really easy, but there’s options here if we get creative.
Maybe there’s some sort of material yet to be invented that can be slapped by a neutron and “deformed” in a way that causes electrons to shift/make holes and exploit that to make electricity.
And that free neutron will eventually decay into a proton and electron, and those have a charge, so if we keep them going around a loop until that happens perhaps we could harness it.
…they found a clever way to induce a current using temperature differentials between the molten salt and some sort of coolant mass?
But you’d have to allow the sun to leak out of the donut, and I’m not too sure that sun-leaking donuts are OSHA approved.
I refuse to believe this.
You’re telling me that Humanity is able to understand what goes on at the heart of stars, and is on the brink of being able to harness that power (“Soon TM”), and the best we can come up with is a big tea kettle? I’m not buying it.
There’s got to be a better way of capturing all that energy - like, solar panels but for other types of radiation? Or if that’s not possible because wavelengths or something , maybe make something glow and use normal panels? Or like, can’t we take a particle accelerator and flip it around and pull energy from the particles that go zooming?
I’m sure there’s a reason why all of that is hard, but surely not impossible?
They’re playing fuck, marry, kill.