Plunged deep into her summer greenery, Williamsburg shimmers in the steam-heat of Virginia's Tidewater Peninsula with a haunting, sensual mystique that ordains a tryst behind every fragrant hedge.

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Similarly, solar thermal energy--which harnesses the heat of the sun to generate steam-powered turbines--consumes more than 2, 600 liters of water per megawatt hour, 200 liters more than coal-powered generation needs to produce the same energy.

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KHIC, also widely known as Hanjung, had been in the Gulf since 1986, providing heat-recovery steam generators for the Jebel Ali thermal power plant in the United Arab Emirates.

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There are many nontrivial ancillary challenges too, especially the secondary procedure of actually getting the energy out of the reactor into a useful form, i.e. heat to drive steam-turbines as with all other kinds of thermal power stations, to generate electricity.

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As solar panel prices have plunged, developers like Solar Millennium have abandoned solar thermal technology, which uses huge mirror arrays to heat water to create steam that drives an electricity-generating turbine.

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Tellingly, about two-thirds of bids for solar energy contracts last year (by electricity generated) were for photovoltaic projects and only a third were for solar thermal power plants, which deploy vast arrays of mirrors to heat liquids and produce steam to drive an electricity-generating turbine.

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The heat released by the molten salt is used to create steam that drives an electricity-generating turbine.

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In a full-scale tokamak this heat would be tapped to boil water, which would then drive steam turbines to generate electricity.

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