Why can't you recollect water after steam goes through a turbine? I thought that was a thing in reality. But on the other hand, nuclear plants always have a huge steam releasing tower thing. Is there a requirement for the steam to be released into the atmosphere? Pressure difference? And a reason you can't economically recapture it?

Or, is it something about how the amount of steam doesn't match the amount of water?

Kinda wish I didn't have to keep producing freshwater for power storage, mostly. But wanted to know the reason.

Technical limitation. The Factorio game engine makes it very difficult to implement. A turbine is currently just one building. A turbine that conserves the fluid in some other form needs to be multiple different fake buildings tied together by scripts, which inevitably has some wonky side effects. At some point I would like to reimplement turbines this way, which would achieve this and a few other benefits, but it's a complicated project.