Amazing, this is in my own back yard and I didn't know it.

Moving this video to Crake's personal queue. It failed to receive enough votes to get sifted up to the front page within 2 days.

Go ahead Gordon and shlump the carrier into the analysis port.

*beg

Sending this video to Beggar's Canyon to plea for a little attention - beg requested by original submitter Crake.

*promote

Promoting this video and sending it back into the queue for one more try; last queued - promote requested by fissionchips.

I like the fact that no matter how advanced our energy technology gets, the end of the process always takes the basic form of heating water into steam...

>> ^rottenseed:
I like the fact that no matter how advanced our energy technology gets, the end of the process always takes the basic form of heating water into steam...


Hah yeah me too. Though that's the nature of the universe, so we probably shouldn't find it that funny. Everything results in heat. That's why we're here right now, with the big burning gas heater in the sky above us keeping us all moving around. You get heat with most things even if it's just as a side effect or 'wasted' energy. So i suppose it's no big surprise that, as most forms of energy dissipate as heat, if you want to generate energy from something else, you have to go via heat.

Pretty much the game, is devising a method that sucks up the least amount of its product.

^rottenseed: Exactly ! When I was small and found out that nuclear reactors were just big water boilers I was so dissapointed

Even storing excess energy for later use (say from windpower), the most efficient way is to pump water up to a dam/lake to make electricity from it falling down later... bah... lowtech...

^There's another project, The Polywell reactor, which skips the heat engine part and outputs high voltage DC power directly from the fusion process.