Humanity invents the most advanced tech everβ¦ still ends up boiling water π
this post was submitted on 26 Mar 2026
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I was so hoping helion was going to work. They were trying to recapture the pulse in magnetic confinement when fusion pulsed. Eliminating steam would be awesome.
all my homies boil water
Yeah, water is fuckin' sick. Thermohydraulics is awesome.
If phase changes weren't so badass we would be so fucked, lol.
Fusion is still five years off, right?
IIRC, most of the people that actually work at ITER don't expect to live to see commercial fusion.
We've achieved controlled ignition several times, but there's a lot of steps still between that and delivering fusion power to your local grid, and I don't think I would trust anyone to give a concrete timeline.
I really thought Polywell Fusion would be the trick, but Australians (and probably the US DoD) have good evidence it doesn't "scale" in a way that will give a energy-positive/fuel-negative cycle. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polywell#University_of_Sydney_experiments
no no no, it's
π π=π 0(1βπ)π
years off.
We keep getting closer, but by smaller increments.
N+5 years off, where n is the current year. We'll get there one day!
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except for solar and wind, i guess. also the thingy where you catch electrons directly from nuclear decay.
Hydro as well.
There are also some chemical modes of electricity generation (Alkalai batteries, etc). Also using flowing water to move Turbines like dams.
But then the meme isn't as fun here, and those are such a small minority of how we generate powers.
Even then all of them but solar are just spinning a wheel.
spinning a wheel.
So hamster power?
And even then some solar works by boiling salt... Or water.
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i mean, they can run the plasma through some magnetic fields...
But it's less efficient that boiling water.
why not do both? get both efficiencies
[note: this is an example of why i am not currently working in nuclear physics]
That's the most common proposal for MHD generators - once it goes thru the MHD proper you use the waste heat to drive a conventional powerplant. Unfortunately MHD requires the production of plasma to be effective, and plasma just does not like to exist, so the engineering practicalities make it... unlikely to ever be even remotely viable outside of incredibly niche applications (although non-plasma MHD has been studied, and I believe there are even some human trials, to power implants in the body like pacemakers and I remember reading about nervous-interface devices in mice that used arterial MHD on to generate the microcurrent needed)
Jesus Christ, I imagined some kind of Matrix scenario when you said human trials.
Worry not, the implanted power systems I know of generate at peak a few nanowatts. Enough to tricklecharge an extremely low power device or run some very very very efficient digital hardware, but no way you're harvesting that power for anything more useful. It'd be far more practical just to have the humans chained to bicycle generators...
The oil crisis isn't quite that bad yet.
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Well, not an engineer myself, either, but generally speaking that would greatly increase the systems complexity, which generally increases maintenance costs, down time, and the initial cost of the system.
You might be able to eke out a bit more power, but thereβs more to the decision than total output and how efficient it is.
What I would imagine were a fusion-powered MHD being useful would be as a front end to fusion-based plasma propulsion. (Basically something like the VSIMR, Hall effect or whatever plasma thruster, where the fusion reaction generates both some power to create the thrust and its exhaust plasma is also the reaction mass.(I mentioned Iβm not an engineerβ¦ right? Just an incorrigible nerd who likes sci-fi.)
There's a few things (I am an engineer, though not nuclear):
- Efficiencies don't necessarily stack like that. For boiling water you're dependent on kinetic energy as heat. I'm not familiar with running plasma through magnetic fields for power generation, but if you lose thermal energy, your overall efficiency may be worse.
- In power generation, reliability is obviously extremely important, and the nuclear industry is highly risk-averse. So doing something in a known, tested way is preferable. Any downtime is extremely expensive if things break, since it may be gigawatts of power you're not selling.
- Big magnets and handling highly energetic plasma are both really expensive. Steam turbines and generators have existing supply chains since we use them everywhere. I think cost is a big part, since the people building power plants want to make their money back sooner, so may not want to pay millions to billions more for a few percent efficiency gain.
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We never left steam engines really.
To me, and apparently the Greeks!
It is not known whether the aeolipile was put to any practical use in ancient times, and if it was seen as a pragmatic device, a whimsical novelty, an object of reverence, or some other thing.
Wow, that's the first time I've seen the source of the bald meme
That's just the effect of fusion. It regrows hair.
There's also Direct Energy Conversion, Radiophotovoltaics and Radioisotope Thermoelectric Generators, but none of those are practical for large scales (and only DEC works with fusion, hypothetically)
If they make an artificial sun inside a donut why donβt they line the donut with solar panels? Are they stupid?
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.
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Real answer: The sheer amount of neutron radiation thrown off by fusion would mechanically erode the panels. This is why the Lockheed Martin fusion reactor they claimed to have built is complete BS - their design ignored the requirement to shield their superconductors from the neutron radiation, allowing them to be placed far closer to the reaction (and thus vastly lower the power requirements). While it could have theoretically worked briefly, it would have eaten itself into radioactive dust astoundingly quickly.
Make alternator spin. Is only way.
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?
The majority of the energy released will be heat, relatively few high energy photons are released so βsolarβ isnβt a viable option and your suggestion about a particle accelerator just doesnβt make any sense.
Boiling water is literally the best way to capture the energy released.
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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.
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You identified the solution. Use a solar panel and let the reactor in the center of our system do the work. Add a batteries to make up for being blocked. Today, solar AND batteries are cheaper than fission reactors. Fusion has promise, but why over invest in a maybe when you can use the technology we have today? Is it because It has an end game where you don't infinity extract resources? Who would want that?
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Don't sell steam power short or water for drinking.
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