Well, you can apparently also use supercritical carbon dioxide.
That might be fun.
But you're basically still boiling something to make it spin a magnet.
this post was submitted on 30 Nov 2025
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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?
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Fusion releases a daughter particle and a neutron. The daughter particle is much larger and will deposit its energy back into the plasma, the neutron will travel much further until it hits a collector outside the chamber, heating it up, which will heat water. You don't get to decide which direction the neutron goes, so you have to build this collector around the entire thing.
There is a hydrogen fusion reaction that releases beta particles, i.e., electrons. This could be used to produce electricity directly without boiling water, but I think the heat output would be such that you could also boil water for more electricity.
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Why is that a problem, exactly?
Because it's not as cool as directly harvest the energy itself like in scifi.
geothermal is boiling water too, and it's pretty neat
I've been thinking that for a while. Issue is that it's risky, if you fuck up there's a pretty high chance that there are going to be a lot of houses with cracks in their walls (assuming you're doing it in a relatively densely populated area that doesn't normally see earthquakes).
Any powerplant will usually done in a pretty isolated area for safety reason, so i'd assume the chance of it happen is very, very slim. If location isn't permitted it's probably shouldn't be build, especially for the type that need to dig very deep to access the heat, so solar panel on roof is probably the best way for any power generation that is placed close or in the populated area.
Here in Germany, that hasn't been true at all so far. For starters, there aren't any "pretty isolated areas" in the first place, since the entire country is pretty densely settled compared to e.g. Iceland. There are still some ongoing projects, though, IIRC they are usually being done for district heating, which has to be near populated areas per definition. I think these types of projects aren't as likely to create earthquakes as the ones for electricity in Iceland, though.
Huh, interesting. I checked my country for this and it seems here we too have a coal plant right next to housing area, but it seems like the housing is the one creep toward the coal plant, not the other way around.
But then i'm not sure what sort of error will cause a quake and ruin houses. Is there any case happen to past construction?
I don't think a coal plant would cause earthquakes.
From @crater2150@feddit.org's comment:
village in Germany, where many houses were damaged by geothermal plants, caused by water entering layers where it usually didn’t reach and the material there taking in water and expanding
It's specific to geothermal
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Iirc magnetohydrodynamic or MHD generators were a possible way to not boil water
There are a million efficient ways to make heat and tons of new development to be made in making heat in new ways. There is relatively very little development in turning heat into kinetic energy and then electricity when size and weight are no object. The combined cycle turbine is incredibly efficient and is likely to continue to be ubiquitous in power generation for some time.
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