Wait, you expect Americans to understand the rules of the road? There's the problem...

Sounds like advice a mutter or pickpocket would give.

You clearly haven't seen how drivers in the USA like to handle them. Inconsistent signage doesn't help.
Though other people pointing out that people, even Americans, get used to them fairly rapidly is true. We have an increasing number in my local area, most people handle them fine now.
I learned how to handle them in Germany.

"Seem" would be the point. Unlike many Americans, I'm well used to cogeneration plants. Eielson AFB has one, Fort Wainwright does, University of Alaska Fairbanks does as well.
Yes, I'm well aware of the temperatures involved.
Using a heat pump on the sand would be to reduce the heat levels necessary. And no, no super rare golden grade refrigerant required. Propane, Ammonia, R-32, all of it would work.

As for words vs concepts. You still don't seem to have grasped the square cube law. It's not like I can draw a picture on slashdot.

I'm well familiar that "everything is a heat exchanger", but outside of that philosophical point, when you say heat exchanger, I assume a dedicated designed one, made to exchange heat efficiently in a relatively small area with relatively small or cheap materials.
A cooler is still a heat exchanger, but it's designed to impede that.

A great big huge box of sand ends up being effectively well insulated just because of the high mass to surface area ratio.

Thing is, the biggest cargo ships these days, the ones you'd want nuclear powered first, would easily have the volume/space necessary for a nuclear power plant once you remove the fuel bunkers.
Even the bigger reactors from using only mildly enriched uranium.
Personally, I don't think it's that big of an issue.

There are a lot of nuances here.
1. Primary safety increase for naval reactors is their small size, not weapon grade fuel. 150-250 300MWt vs up 6GWt for a nuclear power plant. Note MWt and GWt is referring to thermal power. They're only about 33% efficient at turning it into electricity. Makes passive cooling easier, plus ships have effectively unlimited cooling water available.
2. We burned an awful lot of weapon grade uranium, mostly from Russia, in our power plants. Diluted it down first, of course.
3. Enriching to weapons grade is very expensive, a big reason for avoiding it when not necessary. Stealing it from an active reactor, even coast guard, is more a recipe for dead thieves from radiation poisoning than a working bomb.
4. We wouldn't be selling nuclear icebreakers to dodgy companies.

That is your ignorance, not mine. You still fail to recognize the concepts, Your entire post is riddled with indicators of failure to understand.
Yes, the more surface area, the more heat will be lost. What you seem to have failed to grasp is that efficiency is a ratio. If more energy is put in and more energy pulled out, while losses stay the same, efficiency goes up.
Heat storage for a given substance goes up by mass. Mass goes up by volume. Volume of an object goes up by the cube. Surface area only goes up by the square. It is why small gasoline engines can get away with air cooling while larger ones need dedicated radiators for cooling, generally water.
So let us say we double the height and diameter of our storage. Surface area, and losses, goes up by a factor of 4. But the amount we can store goes up by a factor of 8. With appropriate internal heat exchangers, ability to deposit and remove heat also go up by a factor of 8. Assuming that we can actually efficiently use 8 times as much heat, with the exact same insulation amount we have cut the percent of losses in half.

Well, have fun with your strawman, I guess?
Let me try again. As a building, municipal or not, becomes larger, the ratio of volume to surface area increases. Assuming it is occupied or actively used, that the ratio of people and power using equipment stays the same, that means you have a higher ratio of people (~100W) and equipment for a given surface area. This does indeed mean that even in cold areas, a big enough building will produce more heat than it radiates at a comfortable temperature.
I should know, I worked in one where the HVAC quitting in January in North Dakota was a critical problem. I spent almost 20 years in Alaska and North Dakota. Sorry, but you are debating with one of the Americans who are just as used to the cold as you are. Even camping in it with the military. I was active duty USAF there. Had a very warm sleeping bag.
Next Heat pumps: i wasnt talking about cheap and easy consumer ones. Reread that part, I was talking about using a heat pump to heat up the sand more, then using another heat pump to draw more heat from the sand. Basically, a variation on a geothermal heat pump. During a cold snap you'd be drawing from the sand battery, not an external heat exchanger. You'd only use that when the temperatures supported it.

I write about how China outnumbers us, their ability in espionage and counter-espionage, how they've already managed to get the lead in some aspects, have some stuff about Japan, and finish with one sentence about him. That sentence alone makes the post 'all about Trump'.
That's more on you than me.

Hell, my parents retired 3 years ago with 200k in savings. They still haven't touched it and are living solely off of their social security.

It all depends on what you want to do. Their house was paid off years ago, they cook all their meals at home, and rarely spend money on anything that isn't necessary. It just doesn't cost much to keep the lights on and food on the table.

Except this isn't a heat exchanger, this is a heat bunker, a storage system. It incorporates at least one heat exchanger in order to fulfill its function of actually storing and providing heat, but that can be buried more or less in the center of the thing. As such, other than the integrated heat exchangers that can have their interfaces insulted and not flow air or liquid when heat transfer isn't necessary, the goal is to minimize surface area, which one can by both making the shape closer to a sphere (a cylinder of roughly equal height and diameter isn't that far off), and just making it bigger - and a 4 story structure is BIG. At its given size, you don't actually need a lot of insulation to get a mass that is going to take a long time to cool down via normal heat movement.
Sand itself is fairly insulating.
As for replacing peaking - why not just accept that the engineers have done the necessary calculations?

Big municipal buildings, assuming active occupation, probably don't need that much heating anyways - see my mentioning that as skyscrapers get big enough, they trend towards always needing cooling. Their residential probably is mostly apartments/condos, not as many single family dwellings, which wouldn't be on that system.
Another fun thing that can be done is to use a heat pump system. Then one can really pump the temperature in the sand up with spare electricity, and it'd still be useful even once below room temperature.

It would also harm and thus piss off the rest of the world. Giving not just the USA motivation to come after you, but also Europe, Asia, Africa, and more outside a few outliers like North Korea.

Assuming it's at 450F or so, it could even be heating ovens. A lot of stuff is baked at 350 - 450.

That would be getting into economies of scale and the square cube law.
First, one doesn't need to heat "the surface" to temperature, one can run pipes through the sand even in the middle to deposit and extract heat.
Next, it's like how a big office building or retail store can be heated/cooled more efficiently than a small house, even with less insulation (R-value). It's just so huge that there isn't as much surface area for the volume being conditioned. For that matter, any occupied building eventually switches to always needing cooling, even in the winter, if it is big enough, due to this factor.
Insulating a small box of sand to keep it hot or cool would be tricky and take a lot of volume for the amount.
Start getting up to MW level capacities? Not as much of a problem anymore. The story doesn't mention the diameter, but at 13 meters high, it's over 4 stories tall. That's a lot of volume for the surface area.

I know trigeneration systems exist, was just focused on cogeneration. My other post mentioned using excess power to cool as well. They could even use a similar sand battery that is cooled to use as a heat sinkmto provide chilled water or even antifreeze.
Using the steam to directly power a compressor is efficient, smart, over trying to generate electricity to then power it, at least as long as you already have a campus heat distribution system.
There are other possible tricks with steam, of course.

Simplest way I thought of was to simply buy or obtain your own magnet to unlock it.
Disassembling an old spinning disk hard drive should give one powerful enough to do it.