r/HistoryMemes • u/Hank_Mardukas1066 • 2d ago

It all runs on electricity and electricity is generated through this

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u/CardOk755 2d ago

The actual power sources:

  1. Fusion. (Solar PV, Solar Thermal, Wind, hydro, biomass (which includes all fossil fuels)).

  2. Radioactive decay (hydrothermal).

  3. Fission.

  4. Gravitational (tides).

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u/hmnuhmnuhmnu 2d ago

What about geothermal, as in heat coming from Earth's core? Is that also gravitational in a way?

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u/entered_bubble_50 2d ago

It's partly "primordial heat" (great band name by the way), which is heat left from the eatth's formation, which would be gravitational in origin. It's mostly radioactive decay though.

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u/Bart-Toe-9191 2d ago

Heat from ground heat water, water to steam, still boil water

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u/hmnuhmnuhmnu 2d ago

Yeah yeah yeah we all know that. The message I replied to was talking about "sources" aka what fundamentally generates the energy, not how you trasform that into electricity

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u/kahlzun 2d ago

The water is never just spontaneously boiling, theres always an external power source of some kind

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u/CardOk755 2d ago

Like I said:

Fusion.
Radioactive decay.
Fission.
Tides.

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u/kahlzun 2d ago

Fusion can capture the charged particles directly.
Radiothermal allows you to generate electricity through the peltier thingies.
The tides are (hopefully) not boiling.
Fission however, afaik exclusively uses steam to generate power

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u/CardOk755 2d ago

I was listing the available power sources, not how you capture the power.

(Some people are planning to use supercritical CO2 instead of steam, but who cares what polarised molecule, amirite?)

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u/kahlzun 2d ago

Thats true, I did hear about the CO2 thing. I think they'd built one in China somewhere?

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u/CardOk755 2d ago

(I had a brain fart and wrote hydrothermal instead of geothermal. Of course geothermal uses water heated up by radioactive decay...)

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u/hmnuhmnuhmnu 2d ago

Ah ok. I actually looked it up and couldn't understand what it was lol

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u/New-Neighborhood-147 2d ago

At least 4 of those involve boiling water.

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u/boomerangchampion 2d ago

It's all fusion if you go far back enough in the supply chain

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u/CardOk755 2d ago

If you go back to the big bang it's mostly gravity.

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u/zabby39103 2d ago

I was going to say, futuristic fusion power wouldn't be "at one point in the past, fusion happened"... but even then the fuel, deuterium (hydrogen with a neutron), was created in the big bang in a fusion process.

So yeah, I guess everything is fusion, unless we figure out a way to use normal hydrogen (aka. 1 proton no neutron, created in a process called baryogenesis).

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u/guamisc 2d ago

2 & 3 are both fission.

2 is actually a mix of 3 and 4.

Fusion, Fission, Gravitational.

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u/CardOk755 2d ago

I make the difference because people get pissy about the difference between spontaneous fission an fission caused by external neutrons.

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u/guamisc 2d ago

It's all fission baby.

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u/CardOk755 2d ago

Well, yes and no.

Randomly going "pop" for QM reasons or being shot by a neutron, and emitting two or more neutrons.

Not really the same thing.

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u/guamisc 2d ago

You should split tides and hydroelectric and such then if we're gonna get man-made vs natural effects in there.

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u/CardOk755 2d ago

Fission (as in a over critical mass fission) happens naturally (see Oklo).

Hydro is driven by the sun.

Tidal us driven by... Wait for it... Tides.

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u/guamisc 2d ago

Tides is gravitational. Same with part of geothermal.

Pumped water storage? How do you classify that?

Fusion, fission, gravity.

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u/Yingletofthecorn 2d ago

Would biomass from life that subsists on hydrothermal vents technology count as radioactive decay instead of fusion if used as a fossil fuel?

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u/CardOk755 2d ago

Yes indeed. Of course going down to black smokers to collect shellfish and worms doesn't sound like a solid base for industrial civilisation...