So I'm reading the news recently and I read that the U.S. is going to invest in building a couple of nuclear power plants. Now, I don't know much about nuclear power plants or power generation in general. But I know how to use the googles for finding out about stuff I don't know much about. So I hit wikipedia and all those other websites and I find about all of these wonderful methods of generating power.

Fossil Fuels: Coal for instance. Oil and natural gas too. The main idea is to burn these fossil fuels in order to boil water so that the steam can make a turbine spin and generate electricity using a big electromagnet.

Nuclear Fission: Create a controlled nuclear reaction so that we can heat up water and produce steam to spin a turbine hooked up to a huge electromagnet.

Geothermal Power: Drill a very, very deep hole to reach the hot granite that underlies the earth's crust. This granite is so hot we can use it to... boil water... steam... turbine... electromagnet.

Hydroelectric: Just avoid the whole boiling water bit and spin the turbine directly from a river.

Tidal Power: Make a dam in the ocean and put the turbine there.

Wind Power: Instead of boiling water and using steam, use wind to spin the turbine.

Solar power: At this point, if I had read that we were using solar to boil water I would've just given up hope for humanity. But no, at least with solar we actually just use the energy... no turbine involved.

So my question for more informed readers is: uh, how about not needing the turbine and using some other method of gathering the released energy? Especially in the case of Nuclear Fission. It seems somewhat wasteful to fire up an atomic bomb just to boil some water...