Feasibility study of TES integrated PWR nuclear power plant

Abstract

The portion of renewable energies in the electricity market is increasing globally. However, there are many challenges of renewable energy in order to integrate into current electric power system successfully. One area for the renewable energy system to resolve is the energy storage system due to its intermittency. Moreover, as the renewable energy portion increases the current large nuclear power plant will be required to operate more flexibly than before. When the reactor power suddenly increases or decreases due to the load-following operation, the capacity factor will decrease which will lead to decrease in the plant economy. A load-following method of a nuclear power plant (NPP) suggested in this paper is to circumvent this issue by integrating the thermal energy storage system (TES) to the power plant. The TES integrated NPP can allow the load variation without or less disturbing the reactor thermal power output. The purpose of this study is to evaluate the performance of TES integrated NPP and to verify the feasibility of the concept for the future power market. First, the authors will predict how the electricity demand per hour and the power supply from renewable energy will change in the future. Then, the heat energy that has to be stored in the TES in one nuclear power plant will be estimated and the load-following adequacy to maintain the grid stability will be further evaluated. The requirement of dynamic response for the proposed system will be also investigated and discussed in this paper.