We're getting to a point where we can stop boiling water for electricity.

What a time to be alive.

OptionOfT 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Well, if we want more drinking water we might start boiling salt water with electricity.

	▲	AnotherGoodName 17 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		That's a very obsolete desalination technique. A cup of water with salt added doesn't get noticeably warm since there's just not much entropy difference in salt water vs fresh water. These days you can reverse the process at very low electricity cost with reverse osmosis.

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yangm97 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

99+ missed calls from millimeter wave bored geothermal

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PaulDavisThe1st 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Or as Bill Mckibben observed "for 10's of thousands of years, humanity has burned things to produce energy. The period of fire is coming to an end".

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Andrex 3 hours ago | parent [-]

I think fire is still involved in the creation of solar energy though... Just not man-made fire.

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tialaramex an hour ago | parent [-]

That's not fire. We might colloquially call it fire, but that's not what it is.

Sol ("the Sun") is a ball of hydrogen so ludicrously massive that its own gravity compresses it to the point where nuclear fusion occurs. The fusion produces ludicrous amounts of energy and so in some sense the hydrogen is from our point of view very, very hot, however it's not on fire because fire needs Oxygen and there is none.

	▲	testing22321 an hour ago \| parent [-]
		When I really think about that it’s incredible that such a phenomenon is actually very common in the universe.

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dghughes 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

That's why I hope Helion Fusion does well. The system they are developing sends power to a device that captures power directly no boiling water.

	▲	NooneAtAll3 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		wasn't there recently papers claiming helion fusion's design is literally incapable of producing energy? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wwB4hB9QJX8

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toomuchtodo 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

“How did humanity solve climate change? We taught sand to move electrons with photons.”

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Ygg2 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Except for solar collection that boils water to generate power.

	▲	ZeroGravitas 31 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		China just finished building some but it's a dead end technology. It first lost to PV for daylight generation, then it fell back on storing the heat for use generating after sunset but cheap batteries made that obsolete too.