Hacker News Reader

Comment by dharma1 | Hacker News Reader

Heating is perhaps unsurprisingly a large part of overall energy consumption in the Northern hemisphere.

Helsinki shut down one coal plant used for district heating this spring and is shutting down the last remaining one next spring, well ahead of schedule.

https://www.hel.fi/en/news/helen-phases-out-coal-more-than-f...

I personally am bullish on deep geothermal - there was a pilot project near Helsinki which was unfortunately unsuccessful, but with cheaper new drilling tech (plasma etc) I think this can work out in the future. https://www.st1.com/st1s-otaniemi-geothermal-pilot-projects-...

There are also some startups looking to build small modular nuclear reactors for district heating - https://www.steadyenergy.com/

View on HN

Yep, deep geothermal would be cool, but not as mature. Was specifically advocating nuclear as it is basically a drop in replacement for fossil fuel in existing CHP plants. SMRs might work, though I am somewhat skeptical of anyone proposing "this brand new nuclear tech!" as a solution to difficulties constructing proven nuclear tech - we have decades of examples showing they basically swap one issue for another

agree, I think it could take 7-10+ years for either (deep geothermal or SMRs) to be viable at scale. But once they are, it should hopefully solve carbon neutral heating for good - in areas with district heating at least.

Steady Energy is a spin-off from VTT (Finnish state technical research centre) - I haven't followed it too closely but they are legit. https://www.ldr-reactor.fi/en/development/

Can't be much worse than building another large scale nuclear plant with the French :D (which is what we did with the last one - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olkiluoto_Nuclear_Power_Plant#... - 4x over budget and 14 years behind schedule)

Yep, the EPR design has had major constructability issues with every site (except the one in China, but there may be a lack of transparency with any issues/solutions that were done with them). EPR2 looks specifically to address the issues they've faced at Hinkley, Olkiluoto, and Flamanville ... we'll see how it turns out, hopefully it isn't just another example of throwing out one set of issues for a different set.

Most large construction projects suffer when there is too great a separation between design and construction. There needs to be feedback from one to the other, and when it takes 30 years to go from conceptual design to operational reactor, that feedback loop just isn't there. One big promise of SMRs is for components to be prefabricated - if you're building multiple of an object, the connection between design and construction will be much closer.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com