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Except that you can't use nuclear for heating - not unless you exchange all gas heaters with electric heaters. Which we are trying to get rid off, as they are t
by dirkt 5y ago
Except that you can't use nuclear for heating - not unless you exchange all gas heaters with electric heaters. Which we are trying to get rid off, as they are the most inefficient form of heating.
- stephen999 5y agoA heat pump is efficient.
- danuker 5y agoWith today's absurd gas prices, in Romania, even a resistive heater using hydropower costs less than a gas-powered heater. If you use heat pumps, that goes even cheaper (by the CoP of the heat pump). You can switch power or gas suppliers at any time.
- DennisP 5y agoGiven a choice between efficiently burning carbon or inefficiently using a zero-carbon energy source, the inefficient solution seems far superior.
- polski-g 5y agoElectrical heaters' efficiency is literally 100%. Do you mean the conversion into electrical energy is "the most inefficient"?
- alerighi 5y agoFalse, an electric heater is 100% efficient (it's a pure resistive load). But these days we can do better, and you would say that we can't to better than 100% efficiency, but indeed we can with heat pumps, that are 300% efficient or more. Because they use electricity to move heat from one place (the exterior) to another (the interior), and they can transport more heat than the one they consume in the process. Also, you can use nuclear also for direct heating, without passing trough electricity: city near the power plant can use the waste heat from cooling the reactor as city heating, that is with pipes that bring hot water in the homes for heating the radiators or making domestic hot water. Of course that is doable only for a city very near to the reactor, since transporting the heat have losses. But it was common in old soviet cities to use that form of heating.
- thrashh 5y agoI see this incorrect fact a lot and I think people confuse energy density with energy efficiency. Every joule of electricity will give you more joules of heat than will gas. The issue is moving and storing around a joule of electricity is much harder than a joule of gas.
- Symbiote 5y agoThere are even some district heating systems using nuclear power. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/District_heating#District_heat_from_combined_heat_and_power_or_simple_combustion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/District_heating#District_heat...