Sea-water desalination with nuclear and other energy sources: the EURODESAL project

The importance of nuclear energy for the expansion of world's energy demand

“…For instance, The French PWR-900 is one of the preferable reactors which is a quite famous reactor with relatively lower cost and possibility of construction of series units. On the other hand, The Westinghouse AP-600 has also substantial importance that provides controllable power rate, simple safety units and availability of configuration (Nisan et al 2003). In the desalination process, the water vapour Fig.…”

“…1 Schematic illustration of a simple desalination nuclear reactor circuit (Majumdar 2002) is generated by heating the salt water until the needed temperature which is mainly supplied by low pressure water-logged steam (Khan 1986). There are two important desalination methods: Multiple effect distillation (MED) and Reverse osmosis (RO) desalinations (Nisan et al 2003), about which some technical information has been provided above in Table 2.…”

Study of an incrementally loaded multistage flash desalination system for optimum use of sensible waste heat from nuclear power plant

“…The past studies on the HTGR desalination emphasized on using the MED because they selected nuclear plant cycles that reject waste heat near the lower end of the above‐identified temperature range, at which MED can achieve performance ratio (water produced per unit heat input) that is only possible with MSF at higher temperature. However, the MSF offers the advantages of maturity, reliability and large scale that are desired for nuclear desalination and which have contributed to the MSF dominance with about three‐quarters of global capacity in conventional thermal desalination.…”

“…All of these plants operated, and some of recent designs studied , are based cogeneration with nuclear steam turbine power generator. The cogeneration offers the advantage of significantly boosting the overall utilization of reactor thermal power from the 33% of generating electricity alone.…”

“…The drawback is that live steam from the turbine is consumed as heat source of desalination. According to the joint European study for pressurized water reactor , while water cogeneration doubles the reactor thermal power utilization, it also reduces electricity generation by as much as 13% because of steam being extracted at 90 °C rather than fully expanded to 35 °C in the turbine. As a result, the power generation efficiency of the nuclear reactor is reduced by five points to 28%.…”