Co-optimization of nuclear reactor flexible power operation and maintenance scheduling

Aidan Rigby, Saeed Alhadhrami and Ben Lindley

Energy, 2024, vol. 313, issue C

Abstract: As flexible power operation of nuclear power plants becomes more attractive due to the reduction in fossil-fueled dispatchable generation on energy grids, finding optimal power production strategies that balance revenue generation with operational concerns becomes more complex. This article presents a general framework to aid operators in designing economically optimal long term dispatch strategies for nuclear power plants. The principal novelty is the linking of estimated system remaining useable life (RUL) to strategic operational decisions. It is shown that, depending on the relationship between the fixed costs from maintenance and the associated lost revenue from an outage, it can be economically optimal in the long term to delay a maintenance outage and not perform this alongside refueling. For a given relationship between power ramping and degradation, optimal strategies were found that discouraged load following in some situations while minimizing unnecessary maintenance. It is shown that heavy load following can cause maintenance and refueling outages to diverge due to their inverse relationships with respect to load following, potentially leading to a significant loss in capacity factor. This general framework can be applied to specific reactor dispatch allowing operators to adapt operational strategies as future grid conditions change.

Keywords: Prognostics and health management; Flexible power operation; Small modular reactor; Dispatch; Remaining useable life (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2024
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0360544224038763
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:313:y:2024:i:c:s0360544224038763

DOI: 10.1016/j.energy.2024.134098

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 ().