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Gotta go fast (thelemmy.club)
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[-] AnarchoEngineer@lemmy.dbzer0.com 231 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago)

ACTUALLY ITS BOILING SODIUM!!… ~which then gets used to boil water~

[-] Akh@lemmy.world 139 points 5 days ago

I love that deep down, coal, gas, nuclear, this thing… all done to heat water, make steam, use steam to turn turbines…. We are just in a steampunk universe

[-] BC_viper@lemmy.world 86 points 5 days ago

Always has been.

[-] LurkingLuddite@piefed.social 70 points 5 days ago

Solar panel projects, which many have outstripped this and other projects in power limitations, do not boil water to generate electricity.

[-] lauha@lemmy.world 53 points 5 days ago

And wind turbines, and hydroelectric plants.

But all but solar cells are pretty much turbines all the way down

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[-] starman2112@sh.itjust.works 29 points 4 days ago

It's so crazy that we've found like six different ways to use rocks to boil water. You'd think there'd just be two or three

[-] ArmchairAce1944@discuss.online 8 points 4 days ago

It's going to be boiling water again... Isn't it?

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[-] LSNLDN@slrpnk.net 59 points 5 days ago

I have a theoretical degree in physics

[-] Hadriscus@jlai.lu 24 points 5 days ago

it better be a degree celsius

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[-] Blackmist@feddit.uk 12 points 4 days ago

Welcome aboard!

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[-] ascend@lemmy.radio 68 points 5 days ago

Oh neat like the ones outside Vegas, I always wonder if birds fly into the center

[-] BluJay320@lemmy.blahaj.zone 120 points 5 days ago

Well they certainly don’t fly out of it

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[-] inari@piefed.zip 44 points 5 days ago
[-] Wakmrow@hexbear.net 19 points 5 days ago

For like..... 0.002 seconds it's gotta feel real great

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[-] errer@lemmy.world 19 points 5 days ago
[-] ByteJunk@lemmy.world 49 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago)

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Clearly, the Obama administration decided to spend taxpayer funds on a technology that was poorly conceived and quickly outdated.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.

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[-] herseycokguzelolacak@lemmy.ml 20 points 4 days ago

It turns out boiling water is a really good idea.

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[-] Bad_Ideas_In_Bulk@lemmy.world 17 points 4 days ago

There are a lot of options, but water works, is cheap as hell, and spills aren't much of an issue.

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[-] rayyy@piefed.social 31 points 4 days ago

Never sell proven chemistry or physics short. Water transforming to a vapor is awesome. Maybe we could harness the energy of water transforming to a solid too.

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[-] veniasilente@lemmy.dbzer0.com 26 points 4 days ago

It's incredibly silly that even tho we advance the scale of power, with electricity, solar and even nuclear, all we use it is to boil water. We just can't seem to be able t build any a more advanced mechanism, it seems.

[-] starman2112@sh.itjust.works 24 points 4 days ago

Hard to beat spinning a magnet to generate electricity, and it's hard to beat boiling water to spin a magnet

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[-] MML@sh.itjust.works 10 points 4 days ago

I think this may be due to the specific heat of water, no other substance matches it.

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[-] Aquilae@hexbear.net 27 points 4 days ago
[-] Fabrik872@lemmy.blahaj.zone 14 points 4 days ago

Are we against boiling water only because it is old? Because if that is the only problem and we are ok with reliability and efficiency than i will take old

[-] Skullgrid@lemmy.world 16 points 4 days ago

It's more that when you look at history and technological progress, and our (millenial's) own view on technological progress, the current stagnation and the permeation of said stagnation is a pain point. Every time we look at the news, it's something going fucking wrong, and never delivering on the promise of a better , brighter future.

We saw computers go from 100s of Mhz to 3 ghz ish and just get fucking stuck there. From 16 meg to 64 gigs, and now we can't buy any ram. We had touch interfaces being able to show you an arbitary interface and instead of innovation, we got swiping through stupid videos. We look through the history we didn't live through, and see that in the 20th century, we went through flight and rockets to the fucking moon and then nothing. We have a rocket going to the moon with people in it again for the first time since the 70s, and they aren't even doing anything new, just flying around. We expected there to be fucking bases on MARS by the time we got to the distant year of TWO THOUSAND AND TWENTY SIX.

Even now, when we're coming to harvesting power from the sun, in a seemingly new way (focusing it with mirrors onto salt) it's just going to be the same shit, nothing new, no innovation. Just put the hot rock into water, and harvest it through steam power as if it's the fucking 1800s.

Also, it has a light relation to the evolution inevitably creating crabs once again meme of Carcinisation.

[-] bananabenana@lemmy.world 7 points 4 days ago

Great comment!

I'm optimistic in the space of biology and biotechnology though. People are doing actual SciFi shit right now. We've got CAR-T tech, CRISPR that's trivial to deploy, monoclonal antibodies, mRNA tech, microbiome science, DNA sequencing that is mind-blowingly good, large scale computational analysis and machine learning that's decoding the noise of our genomes, rapid detection of pathogens with a MALDI-TOF, to just name a few.

It's an insane time in biology right now, and it's the current frontier along with computer science/ML.

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[-] gandalf_der_12te@discuss.tchncs.de 12 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago)

Physicists just looove a hot shower

That's the reason why all electricity generation boils down to hot water.

[-] nexguy@lemmy.world 13 points 4 days ago

It's just used to scroll social media again isn't it?

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[-] Mwa 4 points 3 days ago

if its just water boiling in a pot,can you just put a Turbine above the pot and use the steam to spin the Turbine?

[-] Cantaloupe@lemmy.fedioasis.cc 10 points 4 days ago

Turbine go brr

[-] snugglesthefalse@sh.itjust.works 11 points 4 days ago

Well molten salt batteries are a thing, I'm presuming this is to buffer the output of the solar and that the losses were deemed acceptable given the renewable nature of this.

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[-] Kolanaki@pawb.social 22 points 5 days ago

Kickstart this new source of clean energy by burning fossil fuels and spraying CFCs into the air. A hotter planet means water boils easier! 😃

[-] Alcoholicorn@mander.xyz 19 points 5 days ago

The efficiency of any heat engine comes from the difference between hot and cold, you can't get useful work if the water's already boiled.

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[-] infinitesunrise@slrpnk.net 8 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago)

They have (had?) these across the California border from Vegas. Bright as fuck, you could see them dozens of miles away when flying in on a plane, but couldn't look directly at them.

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[-] psoul@lemmy.world 9 points 4 days ago
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this post was submitted on 03 Apr 2026
1006 points (98.8% liked)

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