This report addresses new market opportunities for nuclear energy at a time when existing light-water reactors (LWRs) are experiencing diminishing revenues in the electricity market. This initial technical/economic assessment indicates LWR hybrid operations can increase the revenue of LWR power-generation stations.A hybrid system provides an offtake for energy produced by an LWR power-generation station when the price offered for committing electricity to the grid is lower than the cost of producing this electricity. A secondary user benefits by purchasing electrical power, steam, or thermal energy directly from the LWR site at a cost that is lower than it can be purchased from the grid at either the electricity transmission-customer level or the electricity distribution-customer level. At a minimum, this requires a tightly coupled connection to the power-generation operations of the nuclear plant. The LWR hybrid plant may then apportion energy between the industrial user and the electricity grid to optimize the revenue of the nuclear plant, depending on specific day-ahead electricity-grid capacity commitments and reserve capacity agreement requirements. For this market arrangement to work, the non-grid user is sold electricity without paying grid service fees (i.e., being considered a house load). This mode of energy sharing may require approval of governing utility commissions, depending on whether the hybrid operations can affect grid supply and pricing, and in consideration of provisions for grid-capacity payments that may apply to a hybrid system.

The intensity and diversity of resource development projects has increased by orders of magnitude over the past two decades. At the same time, there has been an emphasis on environmental issues, decontamination of former industrial sites, a recognition of global warming issues, and a focus on the ability of project developers to initiate, operate, and close transient projects without compromising the land and water resource values that underpin existing and future land uses. This concurrence of issues is creating a massive demand for hydrogeologists and groundwater engineers throughout the world. Neither academic institutions nor their funding bodies have foreseen this demand. As a consequence, Australia is seeking to fill its demands by either temporary or permanent importation of skills but, since the same issues afflict other countries, or may come to do so in the near future, the Australian approach will probably be only marginally successful. Another issue confronting all countries active in groundwater management is that the range of skills now required for competent groundwater management around resource development projects have increased. These cannot be readily met by simply increasing the training load on new industry entrants. Rather, delegation of expertise will be necessary and management teams will need to include diverse professions in teams in order to cover the range of responsibilities that must be applied if sustainable decisions are to be made. The authors believe that there is an urgent need for groundwater managers to take up the learning opportunities and expand their skills by working even more internationally. This process should ensure cross fertilization of experience to the benefit of all the countries where groundwater issues are taken seriously.

This publication details newly created energy storage and reactor models developed within the HYBRID modeling repository as part of the Department of Energy (DOE) Office of Nuclear Energy Integrated Energy Systems (IES) program, led by Idaho National Laboratory (INL).The model development included creating dynamic systems-level models of a pebble-bed high-temperature gas-cooled reactor (HTGR), a sodium fast reactor (SFR), compressed air energy storage (CAES), liquid air energy storage (LAES) and Modelica standard library (MSL)-based two-tank sensible heat storage (SHS) in the IES-based HYBRID repository. These models were developed using the latest publicly available data and incorporating the possibility of control strategy inclusion for use with the existing IES modeling, analysis, and optimization toolset. Simulations showcase the capability of each technology to flexibly operate in ways consistent with IES operation expectations.When these models are available, they can be utilized within different integrated energy park concepts to understand optimal system operation, control, and dispatching. Moreover, given the generic nature of the models, industrial partner technologies can be quickly added to the repository by using the existing models as a basis. Additional dynamic models for thermal energy storage (TES) concepts can be developed and added to the HYBRID repository as needed. Also detailed in this report are future development goals for the HYBRID repository, including adding suites of steady-state models, economic costing information, and reduced-order models (ROMs).

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Nuclear power plants in the United States are increasingly challenged to compete in wholesale electricity markets due to the low electricity costs and increasingly dynamic grid conditions from competing generation sources. An alternative market for nuclear power is industrial facilities that can use the thermal and/or electrical power generated by a nuclear power plant to offset the economic losses incurred by electricity market challenges. A generic pressurized water reactor (PWR) simulator was used to show the results of a basic design for a generic thermal power extraction system and tests were run using a set of procedures to show what happens when a nuclear power plant transitions from full electrical power dispatch to 15% and 50% thermal power dispatch. This type of operation leads to losses in turbine performance efficiency due to the deviation from the design operating point, but because the thermal power is also used by the industry load without conversion losses, the combined thermal efficiency of the PWR increases. For the 15% case, the thermal efficiency increased from 32% to 41.9%, while for the 50% case, the efficiency increased up to 60.1%. In addition, for 50% thermal power dispatch, the power dissipated by the condenser decreased from approximately 2000 to approximately 1300 MW(thermal), indicating a substantially diminished impact on the environment in terms of releasing heat into the cooling water reservoir.