Kernwärme hält die Menschen in vielen Ländern warm. Warum nicht unseres?

Because if or when it goes wrong, it goes very wrong.

It does. About 15% of our electricity comes from nuclear.

One reason it isn’t higher is that we are unusually blessed with hydro electric sources.

Huh? My home here in Ontario is powered by Nuclear to the tune of 60% of total energy mix.

The reason we don’t use our nuclear power as a heating source is because centralized heating systems kinda suck. You need to build pipelines and you need to insulate them. You will also need to fix them constantly as they leak.

Also, we have a pretty massive exclusion zone around our nuclear power plants (for a reason) because we actually care about not having residential buildings near them if they were to ever experience a radioactive leak. So you have to build a pretty long pipeline to transport hot water/steam to the consumers. Finally – you would need to add glycol to it. And then scrub it on return. Versus running on remineralization water.

I trust this explains why we don’t do it here and (I hope) never will.

At best – hot water/steam could be used for industrial applications. There used to be a fish hatchery by Pickering NS. There is a concrete plant by Darlington. That’s about it.

I think a better idea is to use the waste heat with partnered industrial uses. Like large greenhouses.

The problem with nuclear energy is that the upfront cost is quite high, and basically you have to keep pouring money into R&D to keep up with the latest offerings.

Because canada doesn’t have the infrastructure for district heating.

Aside from using waste heat from electric power reactors, we could also build specialized reactors designed just for heat.

If you don’t need to generate supercritical steam to drive a turbine and just want to heat water to about 90 °C then it’s much simpler, and even safer.

Fossil fuels were always so cheap (a false cheapness as we have come to understand) that this didn’t really make sense in the past. But we should probably have district heat reactors in every major city and suburb.

Great idea. We can also do this with the waste heat from AI data centers…

Why not do better! Canada is so far behind in Green Energy, you know this when:

[China installed 100 GW of wind turbines in 2025, equivalent to 40 nuclear reactors.](https://energynews.pro/en/chinese-wind-oems-capture-78-of-record-global-additions-in-2025)

The scalability of solar and wind is amazing and what makes it way better than anything else. Literally slap it on the ground and connect a couple of wires. 

Per Article:
‚The global wind market hit 176 GW of new capacity in 2025, a 45% year-on-year rise and the strongest annual growth on record, with China becoming the first country to surpass 100 GW of wind installations in a single year.‘

Sure let’s look at a few very specific cases in the entire world and then ask why we don’t do that.

Why aren’t Canadians better at surfing? What’s the real reason you never see kangaroos in Canada? What’s stopping Canada from being a shipping hub for central Asia?

Thppt