Finish startup Steady Energy aims to build a nuclear district heating plant using a planned LDR-50 small modular reactor (SMR) by 2030. The company was spun out from the VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland – has raised EUR2.0 million (USD2.2 million) in seed funding led by VTT, Yes VC and Lifeline Ventures.
The LDR-50 district heating SMR – with a thermal output of 50 MW – has been in development at VTT since 2020. It would be a first for a small modular nuclear reactor to be applied for district heating. However, nuclear power heat has been used for district heating in Europe and China.
China is building a 23-kilometre-long pipe that will expand the transportation of nuclear-generated heat from the Haiyang nuclear power plant in China’s Shandong province to a wider area, State Power Investment Corp (SPIC) announced in Feb 2023. The plant started providing district heat to the surrounding area in November 2020.
China has the largest district energy system in the world, with over 200 000 kilometers of networks providing heat to close to 9 billion square meters of building space, which is equivalent to more than one fourth of the total floor area of the United States. Most of China’s district heating is coal powered.
The Haiyang nuclear energy heating source project has completed an investment of CNY390 million (USD57 million). Installation of equipment at unit 2 of the Haiyang plant to extract heat began in July last year and has now been completed. The heating pipe network and pumping station in the plant are now being constructed. The project is planned to be put into operation before the end of 2023, SPIC said.
The long-distance pipeline will have an annual heating capacity that can reach 9.7 million gigajoules, providing heat to a 13 million square meters area and meeting the needs of 1 million residents. This will replace the consumption of some 900,000 tonnes of coal, reducing carbon dioxide emissions by 1.65 million tonnes.
The Haiyang plant officially started providing district heat to the surrounding area in November 2020. A trial of the project – the country’s first commercial nuclear heating project – was carried out the previous winter, providing heat to 700,000 square metres of housing, including the plant’s dormitory and some local residents. Earlier in 2020, the project began providing heating to the entire Haiyang city.
The first phase of a district heating demonstration project at the Qinshan nuclear power plant in China’s southern Zhejiang Province was commissioned in December 2021. The project is divided into three phases. The initial phase now provides nuclear energy-generated central heating to 460,000 square metres of accommodation in three residential areas and 5000 square metres of apartments for nearly 4000 residents of Haiyan County. The overall project goal is to have a nuclear heating area of 4 million square metres by 2025, covering the main urban area of Haiyan County and the entire area of Shupu Town.
The Zhejiang Haiyan Nuclear Energy Heating Demonstration Project uses the remaining thermal power from the Qinshan plant in winter to provide heating to public facilities, residential communities and industrial parks in Haiyan County without affecting the original power generation and safety performance of the reactors.
Russia, several East European countries, Switzerland and Sweden have all had nuclear-fueled district heating schemes, and heat from nuclear power plants has also been sent to industrial sites in several countries
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There are some 3,500 district heating networks throughout Europe, serving a total of 60 million people. Infrastructure exists, so there is no cost involved into the heat distribution. Finnish Steady Energy aim to replace existing fossile fueled heaters with nuclear reactors.
District heating in EU uses liquid hot water at temperature of around 100 Celsius.
Low temperature allows using low pressure and therefore simplified techology. The operation condition is actually the most economical for use of nuclear energy. Efficiency is close to 100% as you sell the primary energy (heated water) wihtout converting it into steam.
Please see more at http://www.steadyenergy.com or https://www.ldr-reactor.fi/en/1099-2/
The original point of district heating was to use the waste heat after generating electricity. Nuclear, coal or gas, irrespective.
One big issue with the nukes is certification and security. Easier to be done for bigger plants. Extremely hard for smaller reactors.
Or is DOA even before considering the costs
Also, efficiency typically involves energy usefully used divided by input energy. 100 percent efficiency is thermodynamically impossible.
District heating typically involves low pressure steam, not liquid hot water. Condensing low-pressure steam is a more efficient process than decreasing the temperature of liquid water. Condensing steam provides significantly more energy.
Efficiency is a function of temperature, and to a degree pressure. Basically difference between temperature at which work is extracted and heat sink temperature. More accurately, it is the difference in enthalpy.
To achieve 80 percent efficiency, need to have high pressure, hot steam. Then run the steam thru a steam turbine, generate power using a generator but extract steam from turbine at the low pressure needed for district heating. The energy associated with condensing the low pressure steam is used to heat buildings. Ordinarily, condensing steam from the exhaust from a power plant steam turbine is dumped into the environment.
A system that only uses hot liquid water is not thermodynamically capable of achieving 80 percent efficiency.
The economics of using a reactor solely for district heating are exceptionally poor, particularly when considering operations are only occurring in the winter.
Strikes me as an inherently expensive way to heat a city. Underground piping is required and that cost gets really expensive the larger the area of a city. Throw in an inherently expensive reactor and the economics look pretty bleak relative to more conventional approaches. In general, heat pumps would likely be a better approach because the machines only require an electrical distribution system, which already exists to supply power. If natural gas is available, use that with high efficiency HVAC equipment. A central steam plant could also be used, preferably using natural gas. Also, a centrally located gas turbines providing power and steam could be used.
Trotting out using a reactor to “save the planet from climate change” is a really poor reason to spend huge amounts of money, particularly when considering there is no “climate emergency”. The economics must be fundamentally sound.
I think what you’re missing is that the nuclear plant directly generates heat, 100% efficient. While conversion of heat into electricity is only about 35% efficient, and heat pumps are maybe 50% efficient on average, much worse in colder climates.
So, while you have to transport around hot water, the upside is not throwing away about 80% of the energy!
It’s potentially better than that, because the heat is distributed at a low enough temperature that you can still get a lot of thermodynamic work out of it, so a district heating nuclear plant can still generate electricity, too.