lumpenproletariatboiling water again
pulsewidthMake alternator spin. Is only way.
ByteJunkI 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?
We’ve gotten really, really good at extracting energy from steam, steam turbines can be incredibly efficient, I can’t recall exact figures but Wikipedia cites 90% as the top end.
True, but that’s just one part of the process. Compared to actual chemical energy in the source fuel, most plants
If nothing else, there’s an absolute efficiency limit from Carnot’s theorem. Even for the most modern and efficient gas plants, the limit seems to be ~60%, and for nuclear or coal, it’s much lower at around 30-40%.