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Comment by edynoid | Hacker News Reader

Electricity is not everything. Heating and transport eat up much more fossil fuel. That can be replaced by, uh… nuclear-powered electricity and synthetic fuels, I guess? However you do it, it adds a lot to the necessary power budget.

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If you use nuclear waste heat for district heating and load follow with steam bypass to make hydrogen or just charge batteries you can cover transportation and heat.

You can't use nuclear waste heat for heating. No one wants to live next door to a nuclear power plant, so you can't feasibly transport the heat to someplace where it can be used. Nuclear plants are always located remotely for a reason.

Bad phrasing. I meant nuclear heat that is usually wasted as thermal discharge. Not from high level nuclear waste.

We do have a few communities heated by nuclear district heat. It can ship about 50km ok

No, I get it. I know you didn't mean using heat from nuclear waste, but from the reactor itself: nuclear reactors do produce an enormous amount of heat. But the same is true of fossil-fuel plants; nuclear plants simply substitute burning fuel with a controlled nuclear reaction to produce heat, which then creates steam, which drives steam turbines. It's a heat engine. The problem I see is that it's hard to transport heat. Putting steam in pipes only works so far; you lose too much heat to the environment because the pipe's insulation isn't perfect. There are places (like university campuses) which heat buildings this way, but they're not transporting that steam hundreds of miles.

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