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This study has shown that with coordinated planning of energy centers and new cities, it would be feasible to provide thermal energy from steamelectric power plants to urban areas. With nuclear plants the siting with respect to nearby populations could be in accordance with present-day practice. An analysis was made of a 1980 reference city of 389,000 people with a climate s imilar to that of Thiladelphia. Thermal energy extracted from the turbines of a generating plant that employed light-water reactors would be used for providing space heat, hot water, and air conditioning for the commercial buildings and the two-thirds of the city's inhabitants who lived in three-story apartment buildings. The apartment areas were considered to have an average population density of 21,500 people per square mile in one arrangement and l14i,333 people per square mile in an alternate layout. Heat would also be supplied for manufacturing processes and desalting sewage plant effluent for reuse. The use of heat in the reference city would reduce the average heat rejected to the plant's cooling water to about 63% of that which would be rejected from a single-purpose plant, and this heat rejection would be reduced to 21%o of that from a single-purpose plant during the period of maximum heat consumption in the summer. The cost of distributed hot water in the reference city was estimated to be l42.5f/NBtu, which is competitive for most U.S. cities. The estimate was based on current (1968-1970) costs escalated 1f% per year during a fiveyear period of construction, a 1)4% annual fixed-charge rate, and a charge to the consumers for electricity equal to that which would have been incurred from building a single-purpose plant that produced the same amount of electricity as the energy center. With the charge for hot water for absorption air conditioning set at 79#/Mv1tu, in order to equal the energy cost for compression systems supplied with 16 mills/kwhr electricity, the cost for space heating and domestic hot water would be l98#/NIBtu. If the plant cooling water were used to heat and air condition greenhouses, the cooling towers would be eliminated, and with no charge at all for greenhouse heat, the cost of heat for the city would be slightly reduced. * Advanced nuclear reactors under development include the liquid-metal fast breeders, fast gas-cooled breeders, high-temperature gas-cooled reactors, and the molten-salt thermal breeders.

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