OPINION | DAVID HESS
A winter of good cheer
With the months growing colder almost all the nuclear power plants in the northern hemisphere should be humming along at full throttle, providing life- preserving kilowatt-hours just as low-carbon alternatives go into hibernation. For well-behaved and naughty children alike, every winter is a nuclear one.
David Hess, Senior VP DeepGeo
UCLEAR ENERGY IS FUNDAMENTALLY winter technology. It really comes into its own as the mercury plummets and the weather turns icy. When storms hit and other plants suffer from unplanned outages, nuclear plants typically power on. The energy density of the fuel saves
the plant from unexpected supply disruptions while the high standards and safety culture grants it resilience to bad weather. During the coldest periods, many plants will even provide more electricity than their rated maximum due to the magic of thermodynamics. Beyond copious amounts of reliable electricity, some
nuclear plants have also been adapted to serve nearby communities with precious heat too. Such nuclear district heating systems will surely contribute greatly to goodwill and public acceptance wherever they save folk from
expensive heating bills. With a long and established history in Europe already, Chinese nuclear developers also seem to have recently embraced cogeneration with a will. There’s generally not a lot of good things to say about
the comparatively low thermal efficiency of nuclear plants, but the potential for sizeable district heating systems is certainly one saving grace. As the world starts to grapple seriously with the question of how to actually decarbonise heating requirements it seems very likely that we will see more of this – perhaps even as a standard feature in the future. We can put some of that otherwise so-called ‘waste heat’ to a good purpose. Or, if your preferred solution to the heat decarbonisation
©Alexy Kovynev
challenge is heat pumps, well here too nuclear plants have you covered. They will cheerfully provide the steady energy output required to power these thermal exchange devices and keep people warm in their houses. While any heating solution which puts additional strain on the grid during the winter peak is perhaps not ideal, heat pumps are certainly better than old-fashioned electric radiators. Looked at another way, if Santa’s mythical workshop had need of a power-source, you could bet your last candy cane and mince pie that it would be a nuclear plant. One can only speculate about the engine in the sleigh, but chances are good that’s nuclear also. Super-sonic nuclear rockets if one had to guess. Just a thought, but all that red may serve as a warning as well as a clear signal of unbounded festive good cheer.
Which is a joke, obviously, and yet contains a grain of truth as the nations which are home to the factories that make most of the world’s consumer products are increasingly hungry for nuclear energy. Perhaps in the future they will even be shipped to market in nuclear- powered cargo vessels. Going even one better than St Nick, nuclear plants
“Put it here for now… dearly beloved, we are gathered here today to celebrate the life of German nuclear.”
12 | January 2025 |
www.neimagazine.com
really do provide a lot during the winter season, even to the ‘naughty children’ traditionally excluded from the festive good cheer. Recent news highlighted how during a December dunkelflaute – a German word that translates roughly as a ‘dark doldrum’ – power exports from France to
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