Bruno Comby is a nuclear expert, world-famous environmentalist and author of 10 books on healthy living and ecology. He is the President of the international not-for-profit Association of Environmentalists for Nuclear Energy (EFN) (www.ecolo.org) which he created in 1996.
EFN now gathers over 10,000 members, supporters, local correspondents and branches in more than 60 countries, including numerous high-profile environmentalists such as Professor James Lovelock (university professor, Fellow of the Royal Society in the UK, considered as the founder of environmental thinking since the 1960's) and Dr. Patrick Moore (co founder of Greenpeace in 1971, former director of Greenpeace International for 7 years). He is the director of the Bruno Comby Institute in Paris and a former instructor at the Faculty of Medicine of Paris.
Cogeneration is the simultaneous production of electricity and useful heat.
We find that cogeneration is more and more employed now-a-days, especially to heat buildings in the Scandinavian countries. Cogeneration in Finland, for example, burns natural gas or biomass; we may speak then of natural gas cogeneration or biomass cogeneration.
With the rising cost of energy we may expect cogeneration to be even more widely applied in the future. It is an obvious way to make better use of energy resources.
But cogeneration is not restricted to gas and biomass; it can be used for any source of heat. It is not often used in oil-fired systems; in the future it will probably be more and more applied in coal-fired systems; and certainly in nuclear power plants.
The use of natural gas and oil for household heating constitutes a major source of greenhouse gas emission and the consequent global warming. Therefore the application of nuclear cogeneration to household heating would lead to substantial reductions of CO2 emission.
The purpose of this document is to provide a better understanding of nuclear cogeneration. The concept is not very widely known although it is half a century old and has been tested and proven as we shall see below.
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