this post was submitted on 16 Dec 2024
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Is it just a matter of not being worth it? I see cooling towers releasing what appears to be a ton of steam, pretty high up. If that steam were captured at the top and allowed to condense, wouldn't that result in a ton of water with a lot of gravitational potential energy? That water could then be released and used to power water turbines. Maybe I'm overestimating the amount of water being released as steam, or underestimating how much is needed to spin a water turbine to get a meaningful result, but it seems like wasted energy to me.

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 days ago

More importantly, if water is in steam form it still has pressure (and therefore energy).

Nuclear power plants are designed to cool down (aka capture) as much energy as possible before releasing the water back into the wild.