A new solar and wind integrated sodium fast reactor with molten salt to generate multiple useful outputs with hydrogen

Abstract

The current study proposes the integration of renewable and nuclear energy systems in a hybridized manner to produce multiple useful outputs with synergetic benefits compared to single-generation systems. The proposed integrated energy system is designed to fully meet the power, heating, cooling, freshwater, and transportation requirements of communities and balance the grid, which consists of an offshore wind farm, a floating photovoltaic plant, a sodium-cooled fast nuclear reactor, a molten salt storage system, a steam-based power generation unit, a lithium-bromide absorption chiller, an anion exchange membrane (AEM) electrolyser, a multi-effect desalination unit and a district energy system. The proposed system is also analyzed from the energy and exergy aspects of thermodynamics. Additional modelling and simulations are carried out with time-dependent analysis in a case study for a residential community, which consists of approximately 275,000 of people in California, the United States. The proposed system with 345 MWe, 1,000 MWth sodium-cooled fast nuclear reactor, 100.8 MWe offshore wind farm and 100 MWp floating PV plant is analyzed with changing parameters throughout the year. Furthermore, the overall system is found to be fully sufficient to meet 1,551.4 GWh of non-thermal electricity load, 820.3 GWh of cooling load, and 2,324.8 GWh of heating load. Moreover, to exploit the excess energy and recover the waste energy, to produce more than the triple amount of the freshwater requirement of the community with 39,575,634 tonnes of fresh water and exceeds the transportation fuel requirement of the community with a total of 28,713 tonnes of hydrogen. The highest monthly average energy efficiency is found for the month of December as 72.54%. On the other hand, the highest monthly average exergy efficiency is found for the month of October as 61.11%. The average energy and exergy efficiencies for the overall system are found 63.36% and 52.42%, respectively.