—” A Greenfield project should “
...Include district heating/ cooling.
IIRC some NYC district steam lines are over 100 years old!
Use every possible Btu. I heat most of my house with <100F water in radiant floor heating.
One problem, as the cost of energy drops, the cost of common pipelines no longer look to have pay back in a few years.
Like a Christmas tree, keep hanging more stuff on it.
Absolutely, heat and cold can both be piped economically up to 50km. Most people think AC is the largest consumption of energy in the USA or the EU they would be wrong. Heating consumes more BTUs on an annual basis in both unions. Nuclear district heating could cut fossil energy consumption by 20 to 30% of the total energy consumed on an annual basis. The answer is physics heating is typically done with boilers, furnaces or electric resistance elements<<(60% of all Texas heating is electric resistance) all by the immutable laws of physics have a BTU in to BTU out less than 100%. HVAC is a reverse Carnot process and has a coefficient of performance based on its heat rejection temp and sink temp. For a typical HVAC with a output temp of 20C and an air heat sink at 33C the COP is 4 to 5 this means for every BTU of primary energy used 4 to 5 BTUs of heat is removed from the output stream. This is the reason AC will always be more efficient than heating. Heat pumps are the only way to have a COP with heating for a 10C outside to 25C heat pumping up hill the COP will be 2 to 3 at best.
Nuclear bottoming cycle heat should be used directly for district heating at 100 to 75C which at those temps 50 km runs are possible. 100C is more than enough to drive adsorption chillers or ammonia Rankin cycle coolers delivering 2C brines to a 50km cold pipe route.
Fast reactors have an advantage in load following they do not suffer from Xenon poisoning on power ramps due to xenon being nearly transparent to fast neutrons where as it is a huge thermal spectrum poison. You could cycle a fast reactor from 10% to 100% in a few tens of minutes if you didn’t care about thermal stress on the fuel cladding given metallic uranium sodium bonded cladding that a sodium fast reactor uses you can ramp up and down much faster than a PWR with no need to have a reactivity reserve to over come the xenon effect. This is why military sub reactors use HEU above 80% they must be able to ramp at will from near idle to flank speed and back to near idle many times and with no limits on the time.intervals between them. Fast reactors use high assay but still technically LEU or MOX in the 11 to 20% range well inside the IAEA limits for proliferation resistance.