this post was submitted on 29 Jan 2024
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Collapse
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This is the place for discussing the potential collapse of modern civilization and the environment.
Collapse, in this context, refers to the significant loss of an established level or complexity towards a much simpler state. It can occur differently within many areas, orderly or chaotically, and be willing or unwilling. It does not necessarily imply human extinction or a singular, global event. Although, the longer the duration, the more it resembles a ‘decline’ instead of collapse.
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Fun fact: we still use steam engines in quite a lot of things, actually. Not so much with wood and coil furnaces to power boilers in locomotives, but just about every power plant uses a steam engine.
Yep, even nuclear reactors use some form of steam engine to generate electricity out of the heat they produce. It's remarkably effective.
But of note to OP is that steam engines aren't necessarily unsustainable. The heat to produce motion that generates electrical current can be generated by renewable means. Molten salt solar basically does that, for example, and it fits most definitions of "sustainable".
What types of electric generation that aren’t heat related? I can think of wind and solar, and hydro? But nuclear and fossil fuels are steam, aren’t they?
You answered your own question - correct on all counts! 😊 There are really very few physical principles to base power generation technology off to begin with; it's all going to come down to either inducing a current in a conductor by spinning a magnetic field (molten salt solar, nuclear, fossil fuels, hydro, wind, and anything else involving a turbine at any point all operate on this principle), or inducing a current by futzing with quantum mechanics (photovoltaic cells alone operate off this principle, as far as I understand such things - and I understand just enough to know I understand nothing at all).
Comparing a modern steam turbine to a steam engine is a little bit like comparing a jet engine to a box fan.
It's technically correct, the best kind of correct, but they are wildly different machines.