Natural gas fires both steam turbine plants and jet engine turbines.
"Dylan Smith" wrote in message
...
On 2005-09-28, Jay Honeck wrote:
I would strongly support a program to make our country more energy
independent by replacing all the dumb new natural-gas-fired power
plants
with nuclear plants.
You can't really replace natural gas plants with nuclear plants.
Nuclear
plants provide base load power (they can't easily be throttled) for
the
continuous supply you always need.
Natural gas plants can be stopped and started in very short order -
the
one that's a few miles from where I work essentially is based on the
guts of a couple of Rolls-Royce Trent jet engines coupled to
generators.
They can be brought online and shut down as quickly as a Boeing 777
can
be spooled up and shut down. So when demand suddenly starts ramping
up,
you can crank up your gas station, and shut it down as soon as the
demand goes away. You can't do that with a nuclear station.
--
Dylan Smith, Castletown, Isle of Man
Flying: http://www.dylansmith.net
Frontier Elite Universe: http://www.alioth.net
"Maintain thine airspeed, lest the ground come up and smite thee"