OT: Crematorium heat

[Skipweasel]

A nice warm bowl of Soylent Green, anyone?

[Tim Streater]

I suppose you could re-heat the steam from the final turbine, when it's only just over 100C, rather than condensing it and throwing the heat away.

[John Rumm]

Now there is an idea...

Get yourself one of those huge burn anything boilers like:

resurrect one of the great internet chain email scams like the Craig Sheargold postcard or business card one to have mail directed to you... ;-)

[cynic]

The old CEGB did that at Drax power station. Doesn't seem to have been a success as I understand the project failed to be viable

[Owain]

Would it not be self-regulating?

Colder water =3D more dead swimmers =3D more cremations =3D warmer water

Owain

[Graham.]

water at an adjascent swimming pool - but union

could be done to put the heat to good use there as

If they could pipe the heat to the incubators in the local maternity hospital it will be like perpetual motion.

[Jim K]

nah the ones that feel the cold in the pool will be skinny old bags o bones with nought to burn...you want the lardy gits fuel the furnace to warm the pool, who won;t snuff it from hypothermia in the cold baths - simples (if sick)

Jim K

[Matty F]

Install the boiler by your letterbox so the postman can put the mail straight in, together with mail for the next street that he can't be bothered delivering!

[Matty F]

If you live near Windscale/Sellafield just run your hot water pipe through the piles of depleted uranium outside.

[Skipweasel]

Just bring an old fuel rod home and stick it by the fire. Sort of an inglenuke.

[andrew]

No chance, have you seen the price of pre insulated heat main, it runs to 4 figures/metre. Mind the recent proposal for an incinerator in my home town was going to pump it in a 3km ring and they expected only 1deg C losses in the loop. You could get the same energy down a 63mm medium pressure gas main at GBP7/metre and negligible pumping losses.

AJH

[andrew]

With a back pressure turbine they do that but it's a trade off with thermal conversion efficiency. Condensing at 50C gets an additional 7psi across the turbine. To do that there has to be a big delta t across the condenser.

AJH

[andrew]

I worked on a project at Cardiff uni where the Prof was consultant on crematoria, essentially once heated up by natural gas in the morning the heat from the first body dried the next one as long as it was batch sequentially fed. There were many requirements to keep the flue gas pollutants at an acceptable level.

AJH

[Tony Bryer]

On Tue, 25 Jan 2011 14:32:56 +0000 Nightjar Croydon Power Station, now the site of an IKEA store, used to provide

Heat from Battersea power station was used to heat the Pimlico estate on the other side of the Thames

[Tim Streater]

Hmmm depleted uranium is not very radioactive at all - it's depleted. So you won't get much heat out of it.

[Tim Streater]

Well there it is. My bright idea brought to earth by mere facts :-)

Hence, I suppose, the cooling tower.

Thanks for that,

[Skipweasel]

Much like my wife's cooking, then.

[Mike Clarke]

To get the best efficiency in conventional power station turbines the exhaust pressure is well below atmospheric with a correspondingly low temperature well below 100C. It's some years since I worked in the turbine industry but I seem to recollect something like 35C, the temperature of the condenser cooling water outlets would be even less than this so we're looking at very large quantities of not very hot water, not much use to distribute over any distance for heating purposes.

Rather than trying to utilize waste heat from condenser cooling water I think CHP plant utilizes some of the steam which needs to be bled off from the higher pressure stages which would otherwise be used for the boiler feed heaters.

[Tim Streater]

Yes. You wouldn't even be able to shove it through rads in people's houses.

[Andrew Gabriel]

You're off by miles. Also, life of hot water mains is a tiny fraction of that of a gas main (that's the main problem). Some systems have tried to avoid thermal cycling (which is what kills them quickly), but this never seems to work well enough to make them last.

If only! Unfortunately, keeping them going completely swamps fuel costs.