Comment by PaulKeeble
19 hours ago
The answer in almost all electrical production boils down to spinning a turbine with steam (or wind). Nuclear does it, all the fossil fuels do it and ultimately heat batteries do it too. The alternative is photovoltaic or directly nuclear to electron production and then storage with chemical batteries or massive capacitors.
Most of our electrical production is based on a solution found several hundred years ago, we just made it really big and worked out how to control the heating and pressure of the steam well.
Non-steam turbines have been operated (e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mercury_vapour_turbine), but… steam is just so much easier to work with.
Come on, mercury vapour sounds like sooooo much fun! Where's your sense of adventure?
/s
You missed thermoelectric generators that uses the Seebeck effect to generate a current between two temperature differentials. It's terribly inefficient, unfortunately.