Abstract Nuclear power plants can produce not only carbon-free electricity, but also large amounts of carbon-free heat for district heating and cooling systems. This potential has been conclusively demonstrated in several countries, and is still being utilised, although to a very limited extent. This creates a major, mostly untapped potential for satisfying certain portion of energy needs of humankind without constructing separate facilities for that purpose, just basing on heat losses. The article discusses the conditions necessary to increase the number of such plants. Moreover history and current state of district cooling and heating systems in the world are discussed together with the expected trends of heat and cool generation. The set of information sketched above eventually allowed to formulate recommendations regarding locations of new cogeneration plants and ways of integrating already existing into the district heating and cooling systems. Alongside these points, the key objective is to present an up-to-date review of all district heating applications of nuclear power – both those built and planned, but cancelled, as according to the authors’ knowledge no such comprehensive review has been published in English in recent decades.

中文翻译：

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核区域供热的回归。重新思考热电联产的必要性

摘要 核电站不仅可以生产无碳电力，还可以为区域供热和供冷系统提供大量的无碳热能。这种潜力已经在几个国家得到最终证明，并且仍在被利用，尽管程度非常有限。这创造了一个主要的、大部分尚未开发的潜力，可以满足人类某些部分的能源需求，而无需为此目的建造单独的设施，仅基于热损失。文章讨论了增加此类植物数量的必要条件。此外，还讨论了世界区域供冷和供热系统的历史和现状，以及供热和供冷的预期趋势。上面概述的一组信息最终允许制定关于新热电联产厂的位置以及将现有的集成到区域供热和制冷系统的方法的建议。除了这些要点之外，主要目标是对核电的所有区域供热应用进行最新审查——包括已建成和计划中的应用，但已取消，因为据作者所知，在近几十年来的英语。