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.
this post was submitted on 13 Mar 2025
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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."
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.
Wind turbines as well.
Unless you count the humidity in the air.
And thermopiles.
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.
"Couldn't fit a steam turbine in a calculator."
Not with that attitude you can't.
Time to invent one xD
Which is exactly why when Einstein got the Nobel Prize when he discovered the photoelectric! Kind of a big deal when basically everything before that was turbine driven, as you mention.
Everything before that and almost everything after that.
The only exception i know is fermenting biomass to methane and burning it.
Was an old joke.
I invented a revolutionary new power generation!
"is it actually new or just steam"
".... steam".
There's actually a company called Helion which is trying to skip the steam turbine step completely with fusion energy. Although generally speaking you're correct, they're kind of the exception that proves the rule.
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
Arcanum when?
They have a ton of stuff to figure out still. Seems a longshot, tbh.