Waste heat recovery system for nuclear power plants using the gas hydrate heat cycle

Shin'ya Obara and Ryu Tanaka

Applied Energy, 2021, vol. 292, issue C, No S0306261921001975

Abstract: About 33% of the thermal energy produced in nuclear reactions is converted into electricity. The remaining 67 is released, for example, into the sea, etc., as waste heat. Therefore, waste heat recovery and its use in nuclear power plants (NPPs) are important for increasing the power generation efficiency. Therefore, in this paper, an absorption refrigerator using reactor cooling water (waste heat) and seawater as heat sources was used to generate cold heat, where a gas hydrate heat cycle (GHC) was introduced into the temperature difference between this cold heat and the waste heat of an NPP as an attempt to increase its power generation efficiency. The main specifications, including the gas hydrate power system (GPS) performance, were inferred from the results of previous experiments. In order to clarify the economics of the system, the discounted cash flow (DCF) method was proposed to reveal the payback period of the investment. Also, for case study analysis, a typical Japanese NPP (Kyushu Electric Power Co., Ltd., Genkai NPP Unit 4, pressurized water reactor with a rated power output of 1180 MWe and a thermal power output of 3423 MWth) was investigated. As a result, it was found that the proposed system can improve the power generation efficiency by 8.7%. The results also showed that the generation end efficiency of the GHC is more than 40% and that the payback period by the simple integration balance and net present value is 11 years. Also, it was found that the payback period in the case of the DCF method is 19.8 years.

Keywords: Gas hydrate heat cycle; Nuclear power; Waste heat recovery; Small temperature Difference power generation; Payback period (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (9)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0306261921001975
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:appene:v:292:y:2021:i:c:s0306261921001975

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.elsevier.com/wps/find/journaldescription.cws_home/405891/bibliographic
http://www.elsevier. ... 405891/bibliographic

DOI: 10.1016/j.apenergy.2021.116667

Access Statistics for this article

Applied Energy is currently edited by J. Yan

More articles in Applied Energy from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().