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Comment by thow-58d4e8b | Hacker News Reader

125 would be sufficient to replace one 1200MW reactor. A nuclear power plant usually consists of more than a single reactor.

In addition to electricity, nuclear power plants also produce a lot of heat, which can be used for district heating purposes (called co-generation), as is done frequently in northern and eastern Europe. Heating is the dominant component of the final energy consumption, accounting for close to half of all energy use. This is apparent when driving around in an electric car - keeping the cabin warm easily accounts for ~30% of the consumption. Wind turbines obviously produce no surplus heat to extract

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In the winter that is true but in the summer some of them have had to limit production because the water to cool the plant is too hot.

https://www.climateforesight.eu/energy/nuclear-power-feeling...

https://www.npr.org/2018/07/27/632988813/hot-weather-spells-...

There was a nuclear power station that shutdown in Texas this past winter after its cooling system malfunctioned in the extreme (for Texas) cold weather.

Thermal power stations face a panoply of potential malfunctions, regardless of their heat source. They are very, very complex.

The big thing is that nuclear is more predictable. Downtime is scheduled most of the time. Wind is weather dependant and can be producing noting even if demand is high. This can be mitigated with storage like the 2 dam systems where you pump water uphill when there is a surplus (but that cost efficiency).

> nuclear power plants also produce a lot of heat, which can be used for district heating purposes

Is that the case though? To my knowledge nuclear reactor heat is only used to produce electricity and kill biodiversity in rivers so far.

Also, nuclear reactors are built far away from populous area for obvious security concerns. Are there adequate mechanisms for transporting heat over long distances? That's already a problem for electricity, which incurs huge losses (heat dissipation).

Your response seems a little cynical, but here's an example:

https://www.world-nuclear-news.org/Articles/Haiyang-begins-c...

For net heating climates, my understanding is that this form of heating can be much more efficient than alternatives like electric heating.

That's an interesting project, but it's a little short on technical details. It mentions heating capabilities without a 100km radius but nothing about thermal losses on the way and how that model compares to municipal heating as is usual with waste burning (not saying burning trash is a better idea than nuclear fission, just listing options here).

> my understanding is that this form of heating can be much more efficient than alternatives like electric heating.

It makes sense that mutualizing efforts to produce heat is gonna have a better yield/efficiency. I'm just sure nuclear energy is a disaster (at least all known and planned implementations so far) and i'm not sure whether using that excess heat in this manner is efficient. I'm very sure, though, that it's considerably better than rejecting very hot water into natural streams where it destroys ecosystems.

>"Also, nuclear reactors are built far away from populous area for obvious security concerns"

Really? Look at Pickering nuclear power station for example. Highly populated area all around it.

By French safety standards, that's pretty crazy stuff. Leaks and other middle-seriousness incidents are rather common around nuclear sites. Why people would build it in the first place is a risky tradeoff, but why they would place it in a highly-populated area is outright madness.

In any case, in that model, heating housing using nuclear sites heat makes perfect sense.

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