Technology @lemmy.world Blue_Morpho @lemmy.world 1d ago

Ultimate Steampunk. Canadian steam powered fusion

https://interestingengineering.com/energy/steam-driven-nuclear-fusion-reactor

"In a global first, Richmond, Canada-headquartered fusion energy company General Fusion achieved the first-ever plasma in a reactor driven by steam."

15 comments

It is somewhat bewildering to realize that we have come all this way in technology but somewhere something is always turning water into steam to drive a piston of some sort.
- All power is steam power, fossil fuels are burned to boil water. Heck nuclear reactors are also just boiling water to create steam.
  
  It's all Steampunk but we grew out of our punk phase :P
  
  Solar photovoltaic doesn't involve steam. We can be solarpunk as well!
  
  I guess hydro-power uses steam in the global water cycle so I'll give you that. Radio-Thermal Generators are all solid state, but not much power on earth comes from them.
  
  Loads of fossil power use gas turbines that do not involve steam :x
  
  Solar is (usually) not. Couldn't fit a steam turbine in a calculator.
- Was an old joke.
  
  I invented a revolutionary new power generation!
  
  "is it actually new or just steam"
  
  ".... steam".
Thats pretty cool. Using steam pistons to help compress the fuel enough for fusion, from which that heat gets used to make different steam to then make electricity.
Murca: let's use frickin lazor beams!

Canada: magnets boil water go brrrrrrrr
- Murica: also this was never about power, lasers have no chance of ever breaking even, it's just a sneaky way to research nuclear weapons
- ruzzians use pencils. That's how every NASA joke ends. * correction to a grammatical error, ruzzians is all lower case regardless of word position. Same for putin.
  
  Pencils are problematic in space and NASA didn't spend millions developing it
  
  Sorry had to "ahem actually" your joke :p
They have a ton of stuff to figure out still. Seems a longshot, tbh.

15 comments