It's always steam

I feel like the next big technological achievement will just be replacing water with some other fluid.

"Steam cycle? No, this is the much more advanced glycol cycle."

The nice things about steam is you can get as much water as could want on earth, but something like ammonia which we used as a refrigerant for years would probably work well too and there's planets with ammonia rich atmospheres.
The interesting thing is the cycles are fairly similar at a high level, you just run out in one direction for power and the opposite direction for cooling.
- yeah but s t i n k y
It's why photovoltaics are so cool. Direct electricity generation without having to spin magnets in circles like neanderthals.
- Solar is no doubt the coolest.
  Hydro and wind are also very neat, going directly from mechanical to electric via generator, without a steam-turbine.
  There is also a very cool fusion-category based on dynamic magnetic fields, that basically form a magnetic piston which expands directly due to the release of charged particles via fusion and then captures the energy from that moving electric field by slowing it back down and initiating the next compression.
  A fully electric virtual piston engine in some sense, driven my fusion explosions and capturing straight into electricity.
  Feels so much more modern than going highly advanced superconducting billion K fusion-reactor to heat to steam to turbine.
- I swear those magnet spinners are so uncivilized.
  Semiconductor gang rise up.
- Molten Salt Generators are cool Solar power too.
- "Direct" (from energy created by a massive nuclear fusion reactor in space).
You mean like how refrigeration and heat pumps operate?
I think methylene chloride is already used for lower temp vapor pressure generator.
We already use different fluids for different power cycles, for example organic rankine cycles or just power cycles that use organic fluids are good for low temperature heat sources like low temp geothermals
We could try Brawndo. It’s got electrolytes, which are great for making electrocity.
- How do we go about "utilizing" the Brawndo?

I don’t know why this is constantly criticized as a method of energy capture. Liquids allow for maximum surface area contact, creating more efficient heat transfer from the irradiated rods.

Armchair nuclear physicists should release an improved model before being so critical of the most effective and reliable method of energy generation we currently have.

I'd not that it's criticized, it's just kinda funny that everything comes back to steam engines
- Oh for sure. It’s like a desire path or evolution’s crab in that way. I think I just misunderstood people’s criticisms as belittlement of the process without them understanding why it’s still the standard.
- Steam engines are the crabs of power generation.
I don't think it's a criticism? It's more about highlighting the slight absurdity of super-high tech power generation still using the same method that has been used since the very start of electricity generation. A turbine spun by evaporated water.
- Hey now, sometimes it's a turbine spun by falling water!
- Well seeing as any and all cells in our body are powered by something you could very reasonably call an electron/charge turbine I think it's fair to say turbines are really frickin great though!
Also, water is an amazing coolant. At the molecular level its hydrogen bonding contributes to a bulk property called heat capacity that ends up much higher than most other substances, meaning it can soak up a ton of energy per unit volume (and later release that energy, e.g. into a turbine). And there's even more of that heat capacity in the phase transition from liquid to steam and back. It's crazy good.
It's also super cheap and abundant. The main reason water isn't the coolant for nearly everything is that it can be corrosive. Also steam can be quite dangerous due to all that energy it carries.
- The heat of vaporization is also a huge negative of using water as you need to condense the water and then reboil it which wastes a bunch of energy
Not only that, but we're harnessing the humble yet awesome power of phase-changing matter. The same phenomenon breaks mountains down to rubble, constantly chews apart our infrastructure, and keeps our homes and food cool. It makes a lot of sense to use that same phenomenon to do work.
Armchair nuclear physicists should release an improved model before being so critical
They would, but there are limited options for directly generating electricity. Outside of manipulating magnetic fields with kinetic motion, all we have are betavoltaics, photovoltaics, and thermocouples. And they're all kind of awful in terms of efficiency. Even chlorophyll is awesome at converting air, light, and water, into... sugar, which then has to be oxidized (burned) to be useful.
- There’s plenty of room for advancement in alternative energy for sure. My comment about critics was referring more to the method of capturing and converting irradiated rod heat to electricity. Water vapor is still the standard for a reason. It’s like being critical of a jet engine because it’s basically just a compressor.
I mean it does seem kinda weird that running a heat engine to run a generator is more efficient than using a thermoelectric generator with no mechanical inbetween step.
- Thermodyanmics in practice is weird like that. You would think solid state peltiers would be more efficient than a machine. Solid state usually is in any other application. Just this once, no, pelts kinda suck. They've been around for two centuries now and nobody has made a significant breakthrough to improve them.
- Diagram please?

"Dyson sphere? Boooring. Every type 1 baby species always comes up with the same idea, 'hey lets just surround a star with mirrors and directly harvest the energy! What could possibly go wrong?' Besides the fact your 80% of the way towards turning the star into a fucking bomb (don't ask how we found that out), its basic ass vanilla shit.

Look, you don't progress to a type three civilization by being uncreative hacks. Screw efficiency, the universe is our canvas and this is our art. No, we translocate entire water world planets and ice comets bigger than most moons using manufactured wormholes, hurl them into a designated star and use the steam produced to turn billions of giant turbines locked in orbit around the star. We then convert the mechanical energy to electromagnetic radiation pulses more powerful than neutron star pulsars and reflect them to nearby populated systems with mirrors. Take notes, monkeys."

I put together a thing for a Starfinder session where this one civilization needed a stupid amount of power in order to save their planet from a coming catastrophe. I based it on a laser propulsion method with black holes:
https://www.livescience.com/65005-black-hole-halo-drive-laser.html
In short, you shoot a laser at a black hole, and it whips around and picks up energy (blue shifting it). When it comes back at you, you get more energy than you put into the original beam (the extra coming from the black hole itself, of course). The original proposal was for propulsion, but you should be able to do it for power, as well.
I guess the only thing missing was making it heat up water to turn a turbine.
- When writing the "turning the star into a fucking bomb" bit I was actually thinking about the black hole bomb same process as you describe but instead of extracting the energy or momentum it gets fed back into the system forming a runaway feedback loop leading to super nova level explosion. I doubted that a fellow science nerd on lemmy would see this comment and notice the slight error, but I could also see a real scenario where you completely cover a star with mirrors to the point its own energy is radiated back into itself forming a similar feedback loop causing it to explode.
This almost gave me conniptions
How would you not move the turbine by hitting it with a jet of million-degree steam?
- A type three civilization capable of generating wormholes and changing universal constants within a bubble of localized space light-years in diameter when a type 1er ask them how they do anything:
  "Graviton stabilizers, tethers, oh and
  Any other questions?"

This is an awful writing prompt but it's funny in itself

They're mostly like that ime
- Some aren't great but this one is really bad because it's a complete story in itself

I did it again...

I hate this. So much.

I can't let this slander against Josiah Willard Gibbs stand.

"wait a second, what is the steam made of?"

"Tin. Why, what do you guys use?"

"Erm, nothing, just, continue please."

"Okay, so given the Strontium sulfide needed to balance the vapor out, we ended up with a Strontium-Tin mixture.We boys in the shop call it the Stin engine. Ain't that a blast?"

"Nevermind "

It doesn't have to be steam. You can also use the generated energy to pump water up to a location of higher gravitational potential, then use that to spin turbines as it comes back down.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pumped-storage_hydroelectricity

Ah yes, liquid steam
- Fantastic
How are you generating that energy though? Oh yeah, steam. :panic:
- Well yes assuming your reactor creates heat, you need to convert that to mechanical energy to run a pump. A steam turbine is very efficient for that lol
- Why don't they just let the steam rise on its own? Are they stupid?
But how do you get the energy to pump the water up stream

Sometimes it's wind or water, and photovoltaic panels don't even use a dynamo. But classics sometimes are classics for a reason.

Water has 1 to 14 expansion rate when vaporized. It's always steam.

"gets" ? or "has" ?

he has to get it from the store because of other stuff the aliens did