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by Devils-Avocado 2050 days ago
If these can be demonstrated safe it seems reasonable to place them close to cities - providing electricity and district heating.

The air pollution problems of Poland could be resolved a year after these were built, for example, by connecting them into and expanding existing district heating systems - meaning no one would need to burn coal or trash in ancient home chimneys.
1 comments
Schiendelman 2050 days ago
If you had the money to build one of these in Poland you could get twice the impact out of insulating houses and building wind farms and geothermal.

And since it takes a decade to build a nuclear power plant, you could do it all ten times as fast by just spending on existing solutions.

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tuatoru 2049 days ago
> you could get twice the impact out of insulating ...

Yes, the concept of "negawatts" which was popularized by the Rocky Mountain Institute, and Amory Lovins in particular in the 1980s, seems to have vanished from the discourse.

Insulate properly and improve efficiency of usage, and suddenly your energy supply problems are a lot smaller--plants, transmission, distribution, raw materials, waste: all of them.

Time to bring back negawatts.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negawatt_market

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Schiendelman 2049 days ago
Thank you for reminding me of them! I remember reading about RMI like 15 years ago. I’ll try to use the term negawatt. :)
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