Is Steam Power viable without volcanoes?

[Jigsawn]

Ah well, my steam turbine has gone into hibernation mode and I've locked it all away. I'm sure it will become useful in the future if Klei does indeed add in other cooling, nuclear energy and so on. I love it as a concept and it looks cool too. 

Dealing with its constant hot steam output seems to be a pretty big challenge. I wonder if a cooling tower dug upwards would work, let it rise to cooler temps before it condenses and then pump the water away (using air tiles I guess to catch the water). I tried pumping the turbine output steam away to a cool steam geyser cavern. That was working ok, but the pump couldn't keep up with the turbine's output. The hot steam accumulated and heated too fast, overheating all the pumping equipment. And once hot steam builds up it's very hard to deal with as its too hot to pump - you have to bring in cooling or let it escape somewhere and depressurise it over time.

You could use the gas cooling machine to deal with the turbine steam, but that uses loads of power. Maybe you could try to get the steam to an AETN. The main problem is how to pump it there as it overheats all gas pumps/filters. The most ideal result would be to cool the output steam on-site (like the dev mode machines do) and feed the water/cool steam back to the magma/cooker to begin the cycle again. You'd need to cool it enough for pumps not to overheat though.

The excess hot steam has wrecked my oil/petrol infrastructure - its all seeped out into the oil fields through the airlocks. It's heated my petrol tank beyond pumpable temperature and made it too hot to build pumps and filters around the oil zone. It's even too hot for wheezeworts. Dealing with the turbine aftermath is as bad as setting it up in the first place

Still, I hope one day steam turbine will be back with a vengance!

[KittenIsAGeek]

I spent about 100 cycles designing a boiler/condenser to power the steam turbine using only buildings at my disposal.  I can get the pressure differential, but I can't get the temperatures necessary.  Both the aquatuner and the tepedizer overheat long before you reach the 300c required for the steam turbine.  

I don't have a hot steam vent to try, and the cold steam just aren't hot enough.  So, my opinion is that currently, no, steam power is not viable without a volcano.

[Jigsawn]

By the way for anyone interested in steam power, Brothgar did a Youtube video this week which shows how you can get it running via geysers/volcanoes. However it relies on complex airlock sequence gates and the usual devmode playgrounds - advanced toolkit players only. It also seems hard to keep it running all the time. At least he found a way!

 

[BlueLance]

That's one big build.