Retired engineer Louis Michaud makes small tornados in his garage, but he wants to build them miles high. It works like this: route a nuclear power plant’s cooling pipes through an especially constructed building. Use big fans to blow air over the pipes. Use baffles and retaining walls to shape the hot air into a vortex. Put turbines in the path of the resultant tornado and recapture the energy that would otherwise be lost as waste heat. The idea without all the journalistic fluff of the article linked above is described on Michaud’s website, complete with diagrams. [digg]