“We did your mom, in every timeline and parallel universe where you were born too just to flex.”

Behold…the future of green power. No steam or water needed at all!

What about a turbine spun by the convection of evaporation from a large body of water being pulled toward a dry landmass?

Solar (photovoltaics), wind turbines, and hydroelectric are a few non-steam energy sources in use.

As for theoretical sources, some of the pulsed-power fusion concepts use the electromagnetic pulse from fusion to directly induce electrical power. But none of these have been demonstrated yet.

On the nuclear side there are also alpha voltaics, beta voltaics and gamma voltaics that take radiation and generate electricity. Alpha rely on alpha particles ionizing usually a gas, Beta voltaics rely on beta particles which are electron or positron emissions and gamma voltaics take photons in the gamma region and use them to excite electrons to generate electricity.

Overall though heating water is significantly easier to do, more efficient, and more robust

Excluding things that still involve moving fluid through a turbine or piston engine mechanically driving a dynamo or alternator while simply swapping out the steam for another fluid (too obvious), here’s all the ones I could find:

• batteries
• fuel cells
• photovoltaics
• piezoelectrics (which the other reply already mentioned)
• thermoelectrics (specifically, the Seebeck effect)
• photon-intermediate direct energy conversion (PIDEC)
• magnetohydrodynamic generators

Also not well versed, but last time I saw this topic come up, someone mentioned towers that wiggle in the wind and generate energy via the wiggles, apparently interacting with liquid at no point.

edit: Also maybe this YouTuber’s creation? https://youtu.be/BSxK5VagSb8

Thermo-electrochemical cycles.

The idea is simple: the favorability of a chemical reaction is a function of temperature, some reactions are more favorable at high temperatures, some at lower. For electrochemical reactions (e.g. batteries) this means a change in voltage at different temperatures. Some reactions have higher voltages, some lower. By choosing a pair of redox reactions such that the direction of charge transfer can be reversed within a specified temperature envelope, one can create a thermal engine that directly converts heat to electrical energy without requiring a turbine.

There’s lots of research on this, sometimes called the ‘omnivorous’ flow battery.

Oh, there are many. I was referring specifically to finding a more efficient way to convert the heat from irradiated rods to electrical energy.

Water desalinization projects sometimes do. Most of them use reverse osmosis because it’s less energy intensive, but boiling the water can work if you have something else that produces a lot of waste heat. Also, the water on the cooling side of the desalination path can help warm up the incoming water through a heat exchanger.

We do sometimes do that! The problem is the condenser water is usually in the mid 100Fs which by the time you pump that somewhere it cools even more and then most people don’t like living near power plants so the cost of running the pumps and the piping is generally more than the energy saved. Iceland has a lot of geothermal heat that people are much less opposed to living near vs O&G or nuclear

The problem that I see is that unless that magic semiconductor is 100% efficient, turning all the heat energy into electrical energy, then there’s gonna be some left over, and things are gonna get too hot too fast too furious. So you’ll need to cool the thing, or part of it, maybe similar to a TEG using the Seebeck or Peltier effect?

I have a few of these kicking around somewhere. They work, just not super efficient, at all, with current technology.

My point is I feel like no matter what you’re gonna need extra parts to cool the thing. Water pumps etc etc. Why not just use steam? 🤷‍♂️

Edit: nice diagram though!

• where does hotty water go. If hotty water always hot can we always use the same water

• are there no reactors that convert particle interactions into photons and capture it with photovoltaics?

Kind of, it’s more complicated.

There are different fusion reactions, one example would be ²H-³He fusion used by Helion.
²H-³He is aneutronic, so doesn’t produce chargeless particles (every clump of stuff is either an electron or contains a proton). It is also an easy to achieve fusion reaction with good energy yield, with the downside that we don’t have ³He. Helion therefore has to split their fusion into two steps, producing ³He via ²H-²H fusion in a breeder-reactor and then fusing it in their energy-reactor. The first step would then emit neutrons and not really produce energy, the neutrons here could be used to further breed fuels.
Not having neutron emissions is quite useful because it allows you to make your fusion generator a lot smaller and safer around people, so it’s certainly something you want to avoid for far more valuable reasons than improving efficiency.

If we get very good with fusion we could also use the much harder to achieve ¹H-¹¹B reaction, which produces some neutrons but at very low energy (0.1% of total energy output), and is effectively aneutronic for safety concerns (neutrons have low penetration power and don’t really activate material, so can’t be used to breed say weapons-grade fission material). ¹H and ¹¹B are common so require no further steps to produce them.

There might still be directly-to-electricity pinch-fusion approaches that use neutronic fusion, I tried looking for any but didn’t find an example. We’ll see what ends up being done in practice, but close to 100% energy utilization is at least possible using pinch-fusion.

On the other hand, the losses in heat-conversion are inevitably huge. The higher the temperature of the heated fluid compared to the environment the higher the efficiency, but given that our environment has like 300 K we can’t really escape losing significant amounts of our energy even if we use liquid metal (like general fusion) and manage to get up to 1000 K. The losses of going through heat are <environment temperature>/<internal temperature> (carnot efficiency), so would still amount to 30% energy loss if we manage to use 1000K liquid metal or supercritical steam to capture the fusion energy and drive a turbine. In practice supercritical steam turbines as used in nuclear plants hover around 50% efficiency at the high end.

The magnetic field in pinch-fusion interacts with the (charged) particles directly, which are emitted at (many many) millions of K. Therefore this theoretical efficiency will be at over 99.99%. In effect in heat-based fusion we loose a lot of that energy by mixing the extremely hot fusion results with the much colder working fluid.

The way I understood it, the system used electromagnets to create a magnetic containment field to drive the fuel together to create the fusion event. That same magnetic containment field would experience a force from the produced charged particles. That force would produce a current in the electromagnets. That current would be stored in capacitors as a voltage which would be used as the energy source for the next magnetic compression cycle. The excess energy stored in the capacitor after the compression would be ‘generated’ energy.

Yeah, not the right words. I intended to say no steam turbine.
Instead of turning energy into heat into turbinable fluid flow in form of steam, they directly use turbinable fluid flow.
The difference is really the lack of steps up to the turbine.

What if we dunk the entire loop in bleach? Then we’ll be able to see where the leaks are as they happen.

I feel like any rant would take away from the joke of the prompt