China starts building long-distance nuclear heating pipeline

[NNadir]

A small step toward process intensification; eliminating coal fired heating in an area near a nuclear power plant.

China starts building long-distance nuclear heating pipeline.

Excerpt of the brief article from WNN

Construction has begun of a 23-kilometre-long pipe that will transport nuclear-generated heat from the Haiyang nuclear power plant in China's Shandong province to a wider area, State Power Investment Corp (SPIC) announced. The plant started providing district heat to the surrounding area in November 2020.

A ceremony was held on 4 February in the city of Yantai, near the Haiyang plant, to mark the start of construction of a pipeline to the city of Weihai.

"The heat pipe network marks the official start of China's first long-distance nuclear energy heat supply pipeline network project across prefecture-level cities," SPIC said. "It will realise cross-regional intercommunication and sharing of zero-carbon heat sources."

So far, the nuclear energy heating source project has completed an investment of CNY390 million (USD57 million), the company said. 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 metre 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...

I added the bold.

[Alexander Of Assyria]

1. Nuclear heating pipelines. Who knew this and didn't tell the world??

So energy not used for electricity at all, just heating of homes and buildings?

[Blues Heron]

2. I think its waste heat that would otherwise be dissipated.

[Alexander Of Assyria]

3. From article it appears the main purpose of this phase of nuclear power plant is thermal heating to

the population around it, so local nuclear usage of the power.

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.

[Blues Heron]

4. Pays to read the article- thanks

[Alexander Of Assyria]

5. Local nuclear power plants providing thermal heat through pipelines, not just electricity is

of great interest to colder climates I would think.

Use power efficiently locally, and the local heat source replaces electricity or fossil. Electricity can be sent elsewhere.

Nuclear pipeline heated cities, on some planets they have those all over, safely.

[NNadir]

6. No, the point is to use waste heat from the reactors that would otherwise be lost through cooling...

...towers or water.

These reactors are designed to produce electricity. Heat is a side product.

This is not a new concept, and has been a practice in other countries for some time.

The two Haiyang reactors are Westinghouse AP1000 reactors, Rankine devices, that have relatively low thermal efficiency, around 33%, rather like coal plants and gas powered steam plants. The idea is to recover this heat; although it's not really recovered work in the thermodynamic sense, it can be thought of as improved exergy.

I would rather that electricity be a side product, produced only when needed from nuclear heat but otherwise focused on other tasks.

My feeling is that while this is a wise use of waste heat, we really need to abandon the idea of building many more light water Rankine nuclear power plants in favor of very high temperature Brayton devices with combined cycle capacity, possibly including thermochemical water splitting or CO2 splitting cycles to capture the energy as fluid fuels, the best of which is DME, dimethyl ether.

In this case, the thermodynamics would be designed to increase exergy by rejecting less heat to the environment; the rejection of heat being the only case where nuclear energy has a profile as bad a profile as dangerous fossil fuels and the wind and solar energy scam that makes the thermodynamics of gas and coal plants even worse.

I have crudely calculated that under these conditions, nuclear power plants might reach thermal efficiencies of close to 80%. There may be times of the year that heat might be diverted to heat homes or to heat industrial processes, but probably a better idea would be to transport heat as supercritical DME to be used in a network of heat exchangers, heat pumps, and ultimately combustion of the wonder fuel, DME.

[Alexander Of Assyria]

7. Interesting!

Heat as primary output would be most useful in very cold temperature nations, in their winters…Canada, northern USA.

So other than electricity and the use of waste heat due to natural and unavoidable heat shedding, what other terminal use for the produced energy of a nuclear power plant?

On that note, what is the smallest theoretical design for a nuclear power plant, small enough say power a cold climate city of 100,000 people, Western city…such plants could be placed in loci of larger cities also…Neighbourhood Nuclear Power?