Advanced High Temperature Reactor Systems and Economic Analysis

Holcomb, David Eugene; Peretz, F.J.; Qualls, A. L.

doi:10.2172/1025856

Cited by 22 publications

(14 citation statements)

References 14 publications

(36 reference statements)

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“…[7] describes data for a liquid salt cooled reactor, the AHTR, under development at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, which was taken as the reference. The power of the reactor was scaled down from 1,530 MWe to 1,000 MWe.…”

Section: Fig 1 -Tes Capital Cost -Economy Of Scalementioning

confidence: 99%

Molten salt based nuclear-renewable energy system with thermal storage

Maronati¹

2024

RE&PQJ

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This paper presents a concept of a Nuclear-Renewables hybrid energy system (NuRenew), originally introduced in 2011 [1-2] and presented at ICREPQ'16 [3]. Extended use of nuclear-renewable hybrid energy systems can help replace fossil fuel-based energy sources with near-zero emission power sources. The NuRenew concept synergistically combines high-temperature salt cooled reactors (SCR), liquid salt based concentrated solar power (CSP), and liquid salt based thermal energy storage (TES), The nuclear power plant (NPP) and a CSP plant are integrated through a common TES system. This dual use of TES improves its usage which increases its capacity factor and effectively lowers its cost. This improves the overall performance of the system and decreases LCOE. This paper evaluates the benefits of the NPP-CSP-TES system coupling as compared to stand-alone configurations.

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Section: Fig 1 -Tes Capital Cost -Economy Of Scalementioning

confidence: 99%

Molten salt based nuclear-renewable energy system with thermal storage

Maronati¹

2024

RE&PQJ

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“…As the investigations [31][32][33] show, MSRs containing lithium or beryllium produce a large amount of tritium, usually more than 100 times than that in PWR. The common view is that the tritium release should be two orders of magnitude less than tritium production to satisfy the effluent standard, which is still a hard nut to crack around the world, even for MSRs based on FNaBe carrier salt.…”

Section: Carrier Saltsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Low enriched uranium and thorium fuel utilization under once‐through and offline reprocessing scenarios in small modular molten salt reactor

et al. 2019

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Summary Using low enrichment uranium as driver fuel under once‐through mode in molten salt reactor (MSR) attracts more and more attention because of its fuel availability, no new technology, and nuclear nonproliferation. It is regarded as a wise research and development road to shorten deployment time of MSRs and to prepare techniques and experiences for thorium‐uranium breeding of MSRs in the future. However, this fuel management is still faced with some different technical routes, such as the selection of carrier salts, the enrichment of uranium, with or without thorium, and the recycle necessary of spent nuclear fuel. Therefore, various fuel cycle schemes were compared and analyzed using an in‐house developed fuel management code MOBAT. Different graphite assemblies were optimized by changing the salt volume fraction in core and dimension to find a region for best fuel utilization and negative temperature reactivity coefficient. Prismatic block with 10% volume fraction of molten salt is considered as a good assembly type because of its significant space shielding effect of U‐238. For carrier salts, LiF‐BeF2 with 99.995% enriched Li‐7 displays higher fuel utilization and lower cost of fuel cycle than NaF‐BeF2, while the tritium production at the beginning of life will be two orders of magnitude higher. For fuel enrichment, 20% enriched uranium is recommended because the background of neutron absorption from carrier salt and graphite will be more significant in lower enrichment condition. Importantly, it shows that thorium is a good breed and burned fuel in situ and could improve the fuel utilization by 20%. Also, offline reprocessing to recover the uranium is a commendable scheme when the cost of offline reprocessing is lower than 400 $/kgHN.

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“…Recent Improvements of Power Plants Management and Technology report [17]. Others are the same as the OECD's report [16].…”

Section: Fuel Cost Analysis Modelmentioning

confidence: 99%

Analysis of the Spatial Separation Effects of Thorium/Uranium Fuels in Block‐Type HTRs

Ding¹,

Huang²

2017

Recent Improvements of Power Plants Management and Technology

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With the rapid development of nuclear energy, thorium has been gaining attention because of its abundant reserves and excellent physical properties. Compared with light-water reactors, block-type high temperature gas cooled reactors (HTRs) are a better choice for thorium-based fuel for higher burnup and harder neutron spectrum. When using thorium in block-type HTRs, the composition and spatial distribution of thorium/ uranium fuels are two determined factors of nuclear performance. Four spatial separation levels of thorium/uranium fuels, no separation level, TRISO level, channel level, and block level, are defined for the block-type thorium-fueled HTRs. A two-step calculation scheme was used to obtain the neutronic performance, including the initial inventory of U-235, effective multiplication factor, and average conversion ratio. Based on these data, the fuel cycle cost of different spatial separation levels can be calculated by the levelized lifetime cost method as a function of thorium content. The fuel cycle cost changes with the same trend as the initial inventory of U-235 in the reactor cores because the latter determines 70% of the total cost. When the thorium content is constant, the initial inventory of U-235 decreases with the increase of the spatial separation level because spatial self-shielding effect is strengthened by the latter.

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Advanced High Temperature Reactor Systems and Economic Analysis

Cited by 22 publications

References 14 publications

Molten salt based nuclear-renewable energy system with thermal storage

Molten salt based nuclear-renewable energy system with thermal storage

Low enriched uranium and thorium fuel utilization under once‐through and offline reprocessing scenarios in small modular molten salt reactor

Analysis of the Spatial Separation Effects of Thorium/Uranium Fuels in Block‐Type HTRs

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