District Heating

District heating (less commonly called teleheating) is a system for distributing heat generated in a centralized location for residential and commercial heating requirements. The heat is often obtained from a cogeneration plant, although dedicated facilities called heat-only boiler stations are also used. A district heating plant can provide higher efficiencies and better pollution control than localized boilers.

The core element of a district heating system is usually a cogeneration plant (also called combined heat and power, CHP) or a heat-only boiler station. Both have in common that they are typically based on combustion of primary energy carriers. The difference between the two systems is that, in a cogeneration plant, heat and electricity are generated simultaneously, whereas in heat-only boiler stations - as the name suggests - only heat is generated.

The combination of cogeneration and district heating is very energy efficient. A steam-electric power plant which generates only electricity can convert only up to 47% of the fuel input into electricity. The major part of the energy is wasted in form of heat and dissipated to the environment. A cogeneration plant recovers that heat and thus has a degree of efficiency of around 90%.

Other heat sources for district heating systems can be geothermal heat, solar power, surplus heat from industrial processes, and nuclear power.

Nuclear energy has been suggested to be used for district heating just as it has for desalination and hydrogen production. The principals for a conventional combination of cogeneration and district heating applies the same for nuclear as it does for any steam-electric power plant. A radically different proposal that would only work for nuclear is to use the spent nuclear fuel in a lower temperature (and possibly unpressurized) reactor. This spent fuel can't be burnt in the configuration for a nuclear plant because it doesn't have enough reactivity to operate at such a high temperature with a small number of assemblies.Such a reactor would displace the spent fuel pool and provide another alternative to nuclear reprocessing