Chinese Deploys Nuclear Heating in First City

Nov. 9, 2021 (EIRNS)—The city of Haiyang in Shandong province has moved to nuclear heating for the first time. The entire urban area of Haiyang City will realize nuclear heating, becoming the country’s first. The 200,000 residents of 4.5 million square meters of homes in Haiyang City are all using nuclear energy for warmth, vastly cleaning the air quality.

After the project was put into operation in 2017, Haiyang Nuclear Power Unit 1 became the world’s largest combined heat and power unit, replacing 12 local coal-fired boilers. It is expected to save, per heating season, 100,000 tons of raw coal and reduce 691 tons of smoke and dust, 1,123 tons of nitrogen oxides, and 1,188 tons of sulfur dioxide, equivalent to planting 1,000 hectares of deciduous forest, while reducing heat emission to the environment by 1.3 million gigajoules, effectively improving the atmospheric environment and marine environment during the district heating season.

Nuclear energy heating refers to the extraction of steam from the nuclear power plant as a heat source, through the heat-exchange station, with five individual heat exchanges under the condition of physical isolation. Finally the heat is delivered to the user’s home through the municipal heating pipe network. At the same time, the heating fee for residential heating in Haiyang has been reduced by one yuan per square meter over previous years’ fees.

In the first year of commercial operation of Haiyang Nuclear Power Unit 1 in 2018, Shandong Nuclear Power Company put forward the concept of nuclear energy heating, and gradually carried out research and practice of large-scale pressurized water-reactor cogeneration. In 2019, the 700,000-square-meter heating project was put into operation as the country’s first nuclear energy heating commercial project, and was named by the National Energy Administration as the “National Energy Nuclear Energy Heating Commercial Demonstration Project. Efficient, with large-scale promotion and application value.”

At present, the scientific research project of heating 30 million square meters with a single nuclear power unit is in progress, with the heating able to cover a radius of 130 kilometers.

Russia, several East European countries, Switzerland and Sweden have all had nuclear-fuelled district heating schemes, and heat from nuclear power plants has also been sent to industrial sites in several countries, reported World Nuclear News in November 2020.