It’s been more than 200 years since the widespread implementation of the steam engine.
Why is this still the most prevalent means of producing electricity? With things like fusion reactors, why is it so hard to convert the thermal energy into electrical energy?
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You may be confusing steam turbines and steam engines. Steam engines, invented in 1700, used to power trains and boats, but that’s not at all what we use to generate electricity. A steam turbine, invented in 1884, uses high pressure steam to spin an electric generator. So we’re not spinning generators with steam engines the way a steam engine would spin train wheels.
There is simply no other efficient way to turn heat into electricity unless you do it with a steam turbine. And most means to make electricity first produce heat (burning coal, burning gas, nuclear fission, etc), and this heat then needs to be converted into electricity. There isn’t really a device that you can heat up and it would produce electricity. I mean, there is, the thermoelectric generator or Peltier module, but it’s not nearly as efficient as just using a steam turbine, because it needs a temperature *gradient* (one side needs to be colder than the other) while steam can just be really hot and not care about gradients.
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