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Comment by mjlawson | Hacker News Reader

I'm no expert here, but I wonder about the economics around the 13MW of heat that it outputs. There are certainly applications around the world where that could be hugely beneficial. Take Reykjavik[1] for example. How much are they paying for their system now on a yearly basis? How would they like an extra 5MW of energy along with it?

[1] https://vahterus.com/resources/cases/10-mw-heat-pump-system-...

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> I wonder about the economics around the 13MW of heat that it outputs.

I'll take a stab, if only to start a discussion:

13MW is about 450MBTU/hr.

Natural gas is about $7/MBTU. Assuming 80% efficiency of gas to heat conversion, you would need 562MBTU/hr, or a cost of about $80/hour.

If the heat from this nuclear device is sold at the same price per unit heat, it will make $80*8760=$700800/year.

If read correctly, the reactor can make either 5MW of electricity or 13MW of heat, but not both, so it wouldn't make a lot of sense to sell the 13MW of heat. At best sell some of the waste 8MW to make a few extra marginal bucks.

I imagine the heat could be captured and you do both, but you'd need a system to do that, which is probably more expensive.

Natural gas is only $7 / BTU if you are near an LNG terminal. "Remote areas" usually are not. Think about a military base, a relief effort camp after a major natural disaster, of a mining site in the middle of Canada or Siberia, stuff like that.

I’d guess they have enough geothermal power for the time being.

That Reykjavik doesn’t use energy to make heat; it uses it to pump it from A to B.

In addition, I guess the heat it pumps is geothermal (FTA: The new setup is expected to provide over 40 GWh/year of free ocean heat.)

A benefit of using this kind of reactor might be that the source of heat could be moved closer to where it’s needed, If so, but I don’t expect that to offset the advantage of the current heat source giving you heat for free.

TFA even mentions Alaska and Saskatchewan...

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