this post was submitted on 15 Dec 2024
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Science Memes

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 6 days ago (2 children)

i mean... This is how most electricity production works.

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[–] [email protected] 6 points 6 days ago

Humans only have one good way to turn hot into lightning.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 6 days ago
[–] [email protected] 0 points 6 days ago (1 children)

The half life of fall-out from the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs was a couple of decades.

The half life of nuclear waste from powerplants is anywhere from thousands of years to millions of years, depending on the mix of isotopes.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 6 days ago

anywhere from thousands of years to millions of years

only in a strictly thermal reactor environment, if you're using a fast reactor, something like the SSR that is currently being worked on in canada, it can both burn waste, and reduce it's lifespan to a much more reasonable length.

As always, development is the problem, if we had more energy being focused on this, we would be farther along, but such is scientific development.

[–] [email protected] -3 points 6 days ago (1 children)

Don't feed the troll. It won't come back, it's too expensive.

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[–] [email protected] 24 points 6 days ago (1 children)

We've had this discussion here on lemmy a few days ago: practically all electricity generation is by making turbines spin.

Hydropower means river makes turbine spin. Wind power means wind makes turbine spin. Coal/gas power means combustion makes turbine spin. Nuclear means hot steam makes turbine spin.

However, that doesn't mean that all electricity sources are spinny things.

  • solar cells have no mechanically moving parts
  • batteries utilize chemical energy directly
[–] [email protected] 11 points 6 days ago (5 children)

solar cells have no mechanically moving parts

ironically, large grid tie systems are starting to "emulate" the spinning mass behavior of turbine generators, since there's an exponential failure issue waiting to crop up if you aren't careful, as texas has already learned, a very significant part of your solar generation can just, go offline, if it decides grid conditions aren't suitable, which can lead to LARGE drops in power production and frequency, which is likely to kill even more generation.

So the solution is to make it emulate the physical mass tied to a turbine, or at least, more generously provide power in fault like conditions, to prevent this sort of exponential breakdown of the grid. You could of course, use a large spinning flywheel to regulate grid frequency, as is being used in a few places right now. I'm not sure how popular that is, outside of wind energy. It's likely to get more popular though.

weird little side tangent, but the frequency of electricity on the grid is essentially directly tied to the rotational speed of all turbines currently on the grid, meaning there is a very large inertia in the grid frequency, it's weird to think about, but makes perfect sense, and it provides for an interesting problem to solve at large scales like this.

Batteries are really fucking cool btw, the fact that you can just chemically store electricity, and then use it, is really fucking crazy. The fact that it's the most accessible technology is also insane to me. But maybe it's just the adoption being the way it is.

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[–] [email protected] 6 points 6 days ago

Spicy rocks make water hot.

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