Pipeline from a Nuclear Plant Expected to Cut Gas Use for Heating, Brno, Czech Republic.

[NNadir]

Last edited Sun May 19, 2024, 12:49 PM - Edit history (1)

Dukovany to Brno hot water heating supply pipeline takes step forward

Subtitle:

Czech nuclear power operator ČEZ and municipal heating company Teplárny Brno have signed agreements relating to a 42-kilometre pipeline from the Dukovany nuclear power plant that aims to benefit 250,000 people in the city of Brno.

Some excerpts:

The strategic contracts signed cover the removal of heat from the Dukovany units to the boundary of the power plant, ČEZ said, as well as agreement on future contracts which are a condition for steps towards the construction of the heating pipe, with work scheduled to begin in 2027 and due to take about four years.

The companies say that the cogeneration production of heat will help Brno, the Czech Republic's second largest city, to cut its use of gas - possibly covering 50% of its heating needs. The pipeline is being designed to avoid built-up areas and will include tunnelled sections, including one stretch of 1100 metres in the Bobrava Nature Park.

The projected cost of the scheme is CZK19 billion (USD811 million) with part of it to be met by possible European Union subsidies as well as possible financing via commercial institutions.

Czech Prime Minister Petr Fiala said: "The construction of the heat pipe is an important step towards energy self-sufficiency and independence for Brno. If we have been saying for a long time that the basic energy source of the Czech Republic should be nuclear energy in the future, then this project fully meets the requirements and criteria. We will use the heat from the nuclear power plant, we will get rid of dependence on other fuels and we will ensure safe supply of heat to households and institutions..."

The world seems to be waking up to the utility of nuclear heat beyond mere electricity production. The excess cooling should also raise the Carnot thermal efficiency of the nuclear plants.

[hunter]

1. We've completely normalized the dangers, health hazards, and irritations of gas boilers, furnaces, and water heaters.

Having hot water supplied to your home or business as a utility is a great convenience.

The link in your post goes somewhere else. I found this:

https://www.world-nuclear-news.org/Articles/Dukovany-to-Brno%C2%A0hot-water-heating-supply-pipeline

[NNadir]

2. Thanks. I fixed the link.

[Turbineguy]

3. This is an ideal use for "low-quality" heat

instead of venting it as cooling.

[Envirogal]

4. Are you a nuclear lobbyist?

I swear the only thing you post here is advocating for nuclear. Have we solved the waste issue yet?

[Envirogal]

6. And the waste issue?

Lots of assumptions there but your contempt is very apparent. Yes these one trick pony topic posts don’t draw a lot of attention. Your conversion sales job is really working here by the response you get. But I hope you live in Yucca that way you can really walk the talk.

Didn’t hear about a plan for that radioactive waste issue, which is typical. It’s quaint and easy for the non-bourgeois sect to blow that off just like the legacy toxins that no one wants to deal with while the nuke advocates want to add more to the problem.

Price Anderson Act really helps alleviate accountability.

If you get what you want and reach the scale where it’s widespread throughout the globe, I hope you thought this through on what can happen and how you’re gonna deal with these issues. Telling me about air pollution killing more people is silly and a red herring. We are not talking about rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic, trading in one harmful evil for another. I hear the same false promises from the waste to energy advocates. Anything in aggregate is going to be a long term problem if the industries aren’t made to deal directly with the harm they cause. The externalized subsidies have to stop, like draining nuke waste into the ocean after an “incident”. (Since you mentioned Fukushima so often in this rant).

Methane is heating up the planet faster than carbon by the way.

[Brenda]

9. Why are you allowed to break DU rules?

Now, antinukism is a cult, and a feature of cults is that no amount of information can change the views of the cultists. This is true of religious cults, antivax cults, MAGA cults and, to repeat, antinuke cults.

Anti-nuclear is not "cult"

[hunter]

10. Thankfully, there are leaders in the Democratic Party who have done the math.

Without nuclear power the world is toast.

The supposed energy "transition" from natural gas to some renewable energy utopia is a lie, a lie mostly benefiting the natural gas industry.

There are eight billion people on this planet dependent on high density energy resources for the basic necessities of life. Like it or not, nuclear energy is the only energy resource capable of displacing fossil fuels entirely.

By my own reckoning a world economy powered entirely by renewable energy can't support eight billion people.

If we don't quit fossil fuels billions of people are going to suffer and die young.

I we keep pretending renewable energy is going to save the world then billions of people are going to suffer and die young because it can't.

There used to be a lot of enthusiastic speculations about how well renewable energy schemes would work, about energy storage, smart grids, synergies, etc., but we no longer have to speculate about that. Gigawatt scale renewable energy projects and energy storage schemes have been built in places like California. The real world results are disappointing. It became very clear, for example, that the Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant could not be shut down without building an equivalent gas power plant. Solar and wind power are entirely dependent on fossil fuels for their economic viability, especially natural gas, and there are no magical energy storage schemes on the horizon that will solve this problem.

I used to be a radical anti-nuclear activist. I still consider myself a radical environmentalist with a respectable university degree directly related to that. I can do the math. Politically, if Obama and Biden are pitching a baseball game, I'm way out in left field. But my politics are always practical. I've never voted for a Republican or a third party "spoiler" candidate. I'm seeking results, I'm not interested in political posturing. The first President I campaigned for was Jimmy Carter, so I've been around a while.

I don't remember calling anti-nuclear activism a "cult" here, as NNadir has, but I have said some meaner stuff.

In this modern world scientific literacy and numeracy are important. We can't make important energy policy based upon our feelings. Nature doesn't care about our feelings. There's no bargaining with Nature, just hard numbers.

[Envirogal]

11. The math IS the 8 billion people

Last edited Mon May 20, 2024, 02:19 PM - Edit history (1)

The biggest issue we face is there are too many people on this planet to sustain the resources and deal with the aftermath of our consumption/waste. I work in the waste industry And of all the sustainability issues, Waste is always cast aside as a “meh”. Yet, it is about inputs and outputs. Waste is an output of an input. Waste is also a sign of inefficiency because nature does not waste.

And I appreciate your measured and thoughtful response and can respect your opinion on your journey, coming to your conclusion, However, You did not address the waste issue either. And the fact that the nuclear industry needs a massive protection subsidy on a liability in case there’s an incident is a huge flag. And no one discusses that either.

I am never going to advocate for fossil fuels, and there are all kinds of new alternative energy innovations being developed as we speak. And yes, we have to be realistic about transitions. We are dealing with the new problems of spent battery, wind turbines, and retired solar panels. But there’s ALSO Product Stewardship legislation in California and elsewhere to make the industries have to be responsible for “their end of life” products— the goal and intention is for them to figure out how to design waste out of the equation.

But the nuclear industry has a serious decades long waste, problem, and an environmental and humanity risk problem as well. Just like with fossil fuel extraction and transportation, it’s not a question of IF a spill or other incident happens, it’s WHEN. Well, what does a Fukushima style risk look like when you have every country using nuclear reactors?

There’s still a lot of countries that have not adopted nuclear so what does the world deal with if they all do? The sheer amount of carbon intensity to build these new plants, including the amount of silica sand in the cement is a problem. No one is discussing this either. (The world is running out of silica sand. It’s such a serious problem. It’s now a black market commodity.) The aggregate for 8 billion needs can result in “overshoot” and that is a real risk. I have read uranium is going to be in limited supply in the NEAR future and that is not factored in true scale. Has that been really addressed?

And to site a nuclear plant is difficult. I dont think the timeline will have enough come online to reduce the damage of carbon as promised.

Why do these power-plants have to be near water resources or use so much water?(I know why). Is that a safe thing especially as drought and development lowers water levels. RISK!!! In Ukraine, the nuclear plants are at real risk from an attack. In France, half of their plants went offline due to corrosion and cracks not that long ago.

As environmentalists, we have to adhere to the Precautionary Principle—making sure the “cure” isn’t worse than the diagnosis. CFL bulbs were touted as “energy efficient” and it turns out laced with freaking mercury. These well, intention advocates didn’t think it through what happens when the bulbs break in someone’s home or how do you deal with the spent bulbs responsibly? Again, In the drive to solve ecological problems if we don’t look at the end of life steps and outcomes, we are just—trading problems, and delaying inevitable harm.

The solution is a much more serious focus on conserving resources and designing waste out of all of our products and technology we use. It would also be smart to pair this with massively reducing birthrates globally to stem this tide, but try having that conversation with most! Less people, less strain on our ecological systems.

[hunter]

12. We deal with fossil fuel wastes mostly by ignoring them.

And the volumes are HUGE.

Some of these toxic wastes have a half life of FOREVER. Greenhouse gasses we dump in the atmosphere continue to accumulate and these are currently the greatest threat to both the natural environment and our civilization.

We are very well trained to ignore non-radioactive toxins. The amount of non-radioactive toxins spilled by the 2011 earthquake and tsunami in Japan are far more significant than the radioactive substances spilled by reactors at Fukushima, and these non-radioactive toxins have certainly killed more people. But nobody cares about substances such as gasoline, used motor oil, insecticides, herbicides, lead paint, wood preservatives, and whatever other toxins were dispersed by the tsunami. If it doesn't make a Geiger counter click it must not be important.

And sometimes it seems the people who perished in the earthquake and tsunami itself are less important than those few who might die from the radioactive toxins.

It's one thing to say that eight billion people are too many, but what are we going to do about it? Wait for the great die-off, shaking our heads, tsk tsk, simply assuming it's not going to be us, or that we're not part of the problem?

I think everyone on the earth deserves clean water, healthy food, indoor plumbing, modern sewage treatment, and comfortable housing. How do we accomplish that? I don't think we should sit around waiting for magic, those "new alternative energy innovations being developed as we speak," most of which are thermodynamically improbable or impossible bullshit.

The first town to be powered by nuclear energy was Arco Idaho in 1955. France embraced nuclear power and shut down its last coal mine more than twenty years ago. In comparison Germany's aggressive renewable energy programs are a complete disaster.

You can see this here:

https://app.electricitymaps.com/zone/DE

Compare to France.

Nuclear power is a well established technology. It works.

Compared to fossil fuels the volumes of nuclear waste are small and easily contained. After a few hundred years the most dangerous radioactive substances have substantially decayed leaving wastes that are not any more hazardous than the non-radioactive hazardous wastes many industries deal with every day.

Most of the used fuel from conventional light water reactors shouldn't be considered waste at all. It can be reprocessed and recycled to make new fuel. Light water reactors extract only a fraction of the potential energy contained in their fuel. The fuel isn't replaced because it's all used up, it's replaced because the composition of the fuel changes to such a degree that it doesn't sufficiently sustain a nuclear reaction in that type of nuclear reactor.

Using technologies that have already been demonstrated concerns about uranium shortages are unwarranted. Historically we waste uranium in once-through fuel cycles because uranium is cheap and plentiful, and we fear reprocessing because certain nations might use reprocessing technology to build nuclear weapons.

Sadly, nations that have the industrial and intellectual resources to build nuclear weapons will build nuclear weapons if they are not ethically opposed to it or discouraged from doing it. There are easier ways to build bombs than reprocessing used nuclear fuel from civilian power plants.

I find it abhorrent when people who have huge environmental footprints talk about the importance of "conservation." Conservation is easy. If you want to reduce your personal environmental footprint go pour sand in the engine of your car. Disconnect your electricity, gas, water, sewage services. Quit making and spending money. Then what?

[Brenda]

8. Thanks for trying

For some strange reason some people here can break the rules for years.