Why can’t we just install more turbines in the nuclear/fossil fuel plants to generate more electricity?

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Like how if I have a river, I can install multiple dams in series to get more energy instead of having just one dam.

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Anonymous 0 Comments

Nuclear engineer here.

We already do this during plant design. My nuclear plant for example has 1 high pressure turbine and 2 low pressure turbines. By the time the steam gets to the end of the LP turbines, it has virtually no pressure remaining, so it’s useless steam. Adding another turbine would actually take energy away and cause more problems. To add more turbines we would need to add another reactor.

The other thing I’ve seen, is we uprated our reactor a while ago. And in the turbine we changed to a different design that can extract more energy from the steam so that the turbine and reactor were essentially matched in output. We didn’t add more turbines, we just changed to designs which could use more steam.

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