"long-distace" distribution for hot water is rather inefficient. You
would have to move the people close to your nuclear power plant (or the other way round) to make that work.
I get this knee jerk comment a lot. Ever since I first published my suggestion in the early 1980s. Everyone knows that hot water cools down fast when transported long distances, right?
But what you know, based on your intuition, is mostly not based on scientific facts. Unlike all the people that publishes such cock sure statements based on intuition, I am a scientist. My PhD had maths and physics as my majors, so I could easily calculate how much you lose in a well designed hot water pipeline.
I used a pipe from one of Ringhals' (four) reactors to Gteborg (56 km) as an example, and even I was baffled by the result. I had to go over my equations several times, but could not find any errors. The result was, that even in a worst case scenario (surprisingly in the summer months) the total loss would be less than 2%. As opposed to the loss in the electric grid (including all the transformers and other connection points on its way) that starts at 8%.
30 years later, I was happy to see that scientists at the Lund University had made their own calculations, and came to a similar result with the same equations, albeit with a simplified system. Open like at Iceland, not closed like the coaxial pipe with hot water going out in the inner pipe and the cold return water in the outer, that I used.
http://eljaco.se/files/Unnur_Margret.pdf
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