3 ms·
>BTW the waste heat could be directly reused Yes, for district heating.
by emilfihlman 8y ago
>BTW the waste heat could be directly reused
Yes, for district heating.
- semi-extrinsic 8y agoNot really. For power generation as in a coal or nuclear fusion or fission powerplant, you run a multi-stage steam turbine cycle to get down to as low a temperature as possible after the final LP turbine. Because that maximizes the Carnot efficiency of the (idealised) Rankine cycle, it also maximizes real world efficiency. In practice, coing down to ~40 C (~100F) is not uncommon. And then the waste heat is basically unusable, even for district heating. OTOH, if you need lots of heat (maybe you have a chemical plant or something nearby), you can design you powerplant for cogeneration of heat and power, yielding higher total system efficiency. But you don't do that "just" for district heating.
- twic 8y agoYou can (and at least one nuclear plant does!) run greenhouses off 40-celsius air. Maybe some tropical fish aquaculture. But no, nothing at infrastructure scale.