NuRenew – An Advanced Hybrid Nuclear-Renewable Energy Park

Abstract

The paper will present a novel concept of a hybrid Nuclear-Renewable (NuRenew) energy park, originally introduced in 2011 [1-2], that promotes accelerated synergistic deployment of non-fossil power generating sources enabling economically viable phasing out of fossil power plants and their replacement by near-zero emission power sources (nuclear and renewables). While a number of other hybrid energy systems have been proposed [3], the NuRenew concept synergistically combines high-temperature liquid salt cooled reactors (LSCR), liquid salt based concentrated solar power (CSP), and liquid salt based thermal energy storage (TES), for the first time all tightly coupled together in a flexible, robust topology. This integrated approach enables jointly developing high temperature salt technologies for all three systems, thus sharing the development costs, which otherwise would require an investment potentially too large for any individual technology by itself. Moreover, the energy storage is shared reducing the cost to each of the participating technologies. The Nu-Renew energy park is expected to include industries that use high process temperatures and significant amounts of energy, including coal-to-liquid, hydrogen production, water desalination, and manufacturing of PV-panels. For the nuclear power plant, this energy park provides an opportunity to expand beyond the electricity production, to a range of high temperature process heat applications. To protect investment, some of these processes may require extremely high reliability and uninterrupted operation, which would not be possible to guarantee by the nuclear power itself without the thermal energy storage. For CSP, sharing of the TEST costs with nuclear may significantly enhance its economic viability. CSP offers great potential, but its mass deployment will not occur until its economic competitiveness is achieved and insolation intermittency is addressed. Deployment within the NuRenew will enable shared use (and thus cost reduction) of the common thermal energy storage to address the intermittency issue at an acceptable cost for CSP.