[mint2]

I don’t see nuclear making it big any time soon. There’s too much up front costs, but in theory one could make use of any excess heat during off peak hours.

For example desalination, hydrogen production, indoor growing with the light cycle at night or whenever the low demand period is, etc...

For the near future I’d only expect small modular reactors to see much use in areas with unreliable sunlight for chunks of the year. Especially since they could use the waste heat for heating/growing.

[seanmcdirmid]

Nuclear with hydro/pumped storage is an interesting combo: use the extra nuclear power to pump water up into a reservoir and then when extra energy is needed, move the water down through a turbine. The reservoir is basically a battery in this context.

Waste heat isn’t really recyclable, or it wouldn’t be waste heat :).

[labawi]

To generate electricity you need a hot side and a cool side.

The huge towers on power plants are for cooling the warm (waste) output. If you can get someone to cool your warm waste water even further than the cooling towers would, it would both increase efficiency of electricity generation, and use the boatloads of low grade heat for something useful.

You still need independent cooling capability either way.