Yeah about that.
Those are termosolar powerplant, they use the sun to boil water and spin a turbine.
Better solar power extractor.
do you not know how those work?
the sun shines on the side angled upwards and heats it up. everybody knows hot air rises, so this raises the blade, creating the spinning motion.
it’s basic, really. third grade stuff.
Why do I have an overwhelming urge to climb that
You know if you’re a moth, you can just fly up there.
No brother!
BRotHeR i cRaVe foR tHe ForBiDDen liGhT
Are you perhaps living in a place where it snows or something
Sam McGee just wants to do free climbing
Um…no.
Sam McGee just wants to be warm
Yeah that was the joke
Harrumph
All that yet microwaves still leave my burrito frozen in the center.
Gotta lower the power setting and increase the cook time. One minute at 100%? No! One and a half minutes at 80%!
Still don’t understand how this could possibly generate energy.
the power plant is in space and beams energy to the dish.
Right, but like… whatever you’re doing in space is going to be more cost effective to do on earth. Not to mention the insane amount of energy lost to the atmosphere
Unless you really need to optimise for land use. An arbitrarily large solar array in space could transmit to a fairly small collector in the surface.
As for losing power to atmospheric attenuation, high frequency microwaves will pass right through most everything that would scatter visible light. Clouds, dust, etc wouldn’t really impede it.
I won’t say it’s not a silly idea, because it is. It’s fun to think about though.
Big solar panel
Energy loss for wireless energy transmission is actually surprisingly low. Here is an example of 80% efficiency over 1 kilometer: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/1123672
Energy loss for wireless energy transition is actually surprisingly low.
…
yeah but imagine you can put the plant and all the pollution on an asteroid or something.
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.
We’re honestly almost past that at this point. Solar is devouring the world. Total global electricity production capacity is about 10 TW. China is currently producing 1 TW of panels annually. And the panels are still getting better and the prices are still dropping. We will quickly reach the point where the vast majority of global electricity production is solar, and everything else is a rounding error.
There just isn’t going to be any reason to build fusion plants. Maybe in the distant future colonies in the outer solar system and beyond will use them. But for anything inward of Mars, solar is the way to go. Solar+batteries is already, in 2026, the cheapest form of baseload power available. Material limitations are not a problem with modern battery chemistries. Daily swings in power demand will be solved by batteries. And we simply won’t have to worry about seasonal power swings. We’ll build enough solar panels to meet all our winter needs. We’ll build enough to power our cities during the coldest, cloudiest months. And then the rest of they year we’ll have super-abundant dirt cheap power.
The future is one of vast energy abundance. We’re going to find all sorts of ways to use energy that we’ve never even dreamed of before - mostly to take advantage of the abundance of dirt cheap energy we’ll have during all but the coldest months.
The days the steam engine are numbered. With the exception of remote polar outposts, everything’s going solar. It’s simply the cheapest most abundant form of energy we’ve ever discovered. Nothing can match it.
I still think nuclear (probably fission rather than fusion) has a place, at least in terms of land usage. It’s just obscenely efficient in terms of energy per resource investment. Solar generation requires square miles of space and hundreds of tons of materials to match the output of a single reactor.
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.
But I don’t WANT to boil water, I want ELECTRICITY. Like, future electricity!
I remember when this was explained to me and my little mind was blown. Your comment reminded me of that moment. Thank you.
Turns out heat engines are like… pretty good at turning arbitrary energy sources into useful work! Who knew!
Solar panels are all nice and stuft, but what about some boiled water?
Boil water? What am I, a chemist?
I think thats the plan right? Steam turbines i mean…
Can someone explain the solar panels bit at the bottom? Is it because the creator of the meme is advocating that as a cooler method of energy, given that it doesn’t use boiling water, or is it because the fusion reactor can utilise solar panels to convert the energy to electricity?
Because the Sun is a giant fusion reactor.
Oh okay. The reactor will still use steam boiling though
That’s the setup for the joke
Yes, Jimmy; you are.
ACKSHUALLY we’re going to put special solar panels inside the reactor.
And then use the solar panels to power a water boiler.
D’oh!!!
How are solar panels made? Doesn’t it involve mining? Is it renewable?
It’s massively impractical. You’re never gonna believe it.
These things require silicon (good luck finding sand!), but they’re mostly glass and aluminum (ridiculously rare substances that we can’t use willy-nilly on stuff that only lasts for 25 years, and then how are we gonna recycle that? we have no idea how to recycle glass and aluminum!), and then to make it scalable you’re gonna want some safe battery technology like sodium-ion (but where are we gonna find a bunch of salt on this blue planet?)
They are mostly glass and silica I think. The thing that generates electricity is basically a reverse LED. They are also highly recyclable, as the video linked in the other comment explains.
I can really recommend this video by Technology Connections which answers your questions very well. It is long but entertaining and educational. The last 30 minutes is basically a rant about politics and I love every second of it.
they’re becoming pretty recyclable as far as i understand.
check out helion. they are trying to make small, modular reactors that are cheaper to build and maintain, so they can be deployed easier than fission reactors and the couple of fusion designs that already exist. iirc they have the actual fusion part working and are now working on actually getting the energy out of it. real engineering has some good videos about them on nebula and YouTube.
Super cool, thanks for the share. It will be interesting to see what sort of efficiency they get from the inductive energy transfer.
Hopefully they’re not just another Theranos.
