Neurovore said:

What would be the best solution for people who live in rural, spread out areas that would also require a lot of heating, such as in the upper midwestern US? Would it still be economical to set up a district heating system up there for a rather scattered and spread out population?

The short answer: No. If you had some big facilities like college campuses or large clusters of major heat needs then it might be economical to pipe heat out to such areas. But really it’s not economical except for where there’s a great need for heat in small areas or clustered heating needs.

For such circumstances the other methods like heat pumps, electric heat, synthetic gas etc are a better bet.

Electric heat would certainly be the simplest, but if you have an area where there are a lot of people spread out in and it gets very very cold it might be a big load on the power grid. Like anything, it’d need to be transitional anyway and nothing happens overnight.

        Neurovore said:

What would be the best solution for people who live in rural, spread out areas that would also require a lot of heating, such as in the upper midwestern US? Would it still be economical to set up a district heating system up there for a rather scattered and spread out population?

No, these systems only are practical in urban areas.

sorry i’m not too good with HTML and my time here is short

Njoy

imjoekin2.AT.msn.com

        DV82XL said:

And that would be..? I’m near the Slowpoke reactor at l’Ecole Polytechnique de Montreal.

Dalhousie University in Halifax.

        Brad F said:

I’m sitting about 5.5 miles from one right now…

And that would be..? I’m near the Slowpoke reactor at l’Ecole Polytechnique de Montreal.

        DV82XL said:

There are still a few SLOWPOKE-2 reactors in operation in Canada at several universities as neutron sources…

I’m sitting about 5.5 miles from one right now…

Overall a great post. Lots of information here. I’m a big fan of ground source heat pumps (I refuse to call them geothermal due to the geyser confusion) and have been for almost 20 years. Still don’t have one, though…

I moved into a brand new house last fall. My last house used an oil-fired hydronic baseboard system for heat, quite common where I live. For the new one I insisted on in-floor radiant heat, initially supplied by an 18kW electric boiler. Due to specific time and budget constraints, I just could not get that ground source heat pump into my mortgage (and marriage). But the radiant heat setup does put me in a position to upgrade to a heat pump (air or ground source), or even to use solar thermal collectors to offset the electricity costs since radiant heat uses 120F temperatures rather than 180F temps.

I thought you were overly critical of ground source heat pumps for heating in cold climates. While it is true the most cost-effective installations are those that requires both heating and air conditioning, a heating-only installation should have no problem, if the ground loop is designed properly. However, proper design sometimes means making the ground loop bigger so that the ground temperature is not lowered below that which it can recover during the summer. Bigger = more capital cost. The alternative is to fall back on electric resistance backup late in the heating season. There’s a balance, but it works.

There is a cold-climate air source heat pump on the market now, built in Bangor, ME by Hallowell. They claim a Coefficient of Performance of 3 down to -20C. Sounds great, although it still has to prove itself in terms of longevity.

However AECL’s Slowpoke Energy Systems did build – and partly commission a SLOWPOKE-3 demonstration reactor (SDR) at Whiteshell Laboratories, but terminated the project after market interest in the SLOWPOKE heating system dwindled. AECL shopped its SES technology around during the Eighties, before deciding that the competition with fossil fuels wasn’t worth the fight. With nuclear power you can’t just be comparable in cost, you must be persuasively superior. The fact is that it was just ahead of its time, it would probably garner more interest in the present high fuel price market of the present. This idea like the CANDESAL bulk water desalination system based on a small CANDU, and a few other projects suffered from the fact that AECL as a Crown corporation has to dance to a very different tune than a private company and mistakes are best left forgotten, similar to the way NASA seemed to want to forget Skylab ever existed. (In fact there are more similarities between those two than there are differences at least in corporate culture)

There are still a few SLOWPOKE-2 reactors in operation in Canada at several universities as neutron sources, and as I understand it there is (or has been) some developmental work done by the cadets at the Royal Military College in Kingston, Ontario with the reactor there, but I haven’t checked recently.