Maybe nuclear fusion isnt worth it after all

"Dyson Spheres? Look, playing with sunlight and mirrors was a fun side project, but you want to know a much more advanced method of generating power?"

"Please dont...."

"Thats right! By hurling entire water worlds into a star, we then capture the released steam which powers our gravitationally locked dynamo network."

It's always been about finding new ways to spin a turbine

I mean we're all ugly bags of mostly water running around on a rock planet inhabited by living water beings of various construction, all ingesting and excreting water, and we've figured out how to use water (usually with fire) to make rocks do interesting things.

So every time we figure out a new interesting thing for rocks to do, we'll either do it with water or do it to water.

Of course here in a bit we might make rocks smart enough to start doing stuff to/with rocks and fire, which might make all us water beings obsolete.

Reading the comments, it would seem most everyone here thinks that the usefulness of the steam is done when it gets used to turn a turbine at high pressure.

The steam can be used for much more than once. In the 1800's and early 1900s when steam ran trains and ships, they built double and triple expansion engines that took the energy of the steam two and three times before it was done. It doesn't need to be one and done. And when the energy is done being harvested for power generation, it can used for other things. Engineers today aren't dumber than the ones in the 1800s.

I can remember a small rural Minnesota town that had their own coal fired electric plant. (Built back before the REA was a thing). They took the left over steam from power generation and then piped it to around 200 homes in the town and heated them with the leftover steam. While a bit costly to install, it was dirt cheap to run. Those homes lost all that when the power plant was shut down and they had to switch to either natural gas, fuel oil, LP, or electricity.

So don't get hung up on just the power generation. Think what could be beyond that point.

Fusion power will probably go the boring “heat → turbine” route for giant power plants.

Ironically, the things that are most useful in real life tend to be much simpler — basic chemistry, easy to use, and they don’t care if the grid is down.

This isn't necessarily true they could use the brayton cycle at the higher temps a fusion reactor operates at. So instead of making steam it would just be hot air. This is more efficient but might not be used or whatever reason.

Hydrohomies!

Could be supercritical CO~2~, actually

There's only 3 major ways to transform different forms of energy into electricity, which are:

• solar panels (light -> electricity)
• mechanical engines/generators (mechanical movement -> electricity)
• electrochemical battery (chemical dipole -> electricity)

there's a whole lot more, such as thermoelectric generator and piezoelectricity but these are the three significant ones.

note that i distinguish these categories by their core essence, such as whether they're using changes in magnetic flux (like a mechanical generator) or transferring 1 photon on each electron (like solar panels), instead of looking at what source type of energy they transform.

because there's many ways to transform e.g. light energy into electricity. you could also heat water with the sunlight and then drive a steam engine with it. but that's not what i care about. i care about the fundamental connection between different types of energy, and how they can be directly transformed to one another.

Wasn't there one concept too with catching neutrons directly to ...generate heat, ah right.

With rising sea levels and general water shortages, why don't we also use them as desalination plants?

Surely there has to be a way to deal with brine, it's just salt and water after all?