Radiation enhanced chemical production: Improving the value proposition of nuclear power

Diego Schmeda-Lopez, Thomas B. McConnaughy and Eric W. McFarland

Energy, 2018, vol. 162, issue C, 491-504

Abstract: Nuclear power is one of the means for large-scale CO2-free heat and electricity generation. Commercial designs, developed decades ago, have not adopted technological innovations and struggle to be cost-competitive with state-of-the-art fossil-fuel power systems. Though fuel is relatively inexpensive, nuclear power plants are expensive to build and produce only low-value electricity. One strategy to improve the process economics is to use unique characteristics of nuclear reactors to provide additional sources of revenue by co-producing higher value products. A conceptual process is analysed, which combines a molten salt nuclear power reactor and a chemical process using the reactor's gamma radiation to facilitate the production of propylene. This facility is able to co-produce electricity and high volume commodity chemicals using, otherwise wasted radiation. The conceptual process model suggests that integration of units producing an energy product with one that produces more valuable chemicals leads to significant economic benefits for the overall facility. Despite the improvements, the system studied is unable to deliver an acceptable return on investment for small power plants independent of the size of the chemical plant integrated. Conversely, large plants are capable of delivering acceptable return on investment, in some cases generating returns comparable to other modern investment options.

Keywords: Nuclear economics; Radiation chemistry; Process integration; Techno economic analysis (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2018
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0360544218315056
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:energy:v:162:y:2018:i:c:p:491-504

DOI: 10.1016/j.energy.2018.07.208

Access Statistics for this article

Energy is currently edited by Henrik Lund and Mark J. Kaiser

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