Probability of Nuclear Desalination for the Usage with Economical Incentives and Future Prospects

Abstract

Considering the increasing demand for electricity, and the limited water resources in Egypt, adopting nuclear power plants as a dual purpose for producing electric power and fresh water has become urgent and essential. With the decision to use the nuclear power plants in Egypt, we introduce a technical demonstration for the different techniques and capabilities of NPPs that are used to supply the energy required to produce electricity fresh water by desalination. The current sources of energy which is required for the today’s desalination methods costs much, beside its pollution effects. That motivated many countries to move towards the NPPs, which are cost competitive. In this paper, various desalination processes and the most appropriate method selected are assess and evaluated. Considering the limited fresh water resources in Egypt, different techniques used as heating sources for new desalination projects in the country, like solar systems and SMRs and their cost competitiveness have been reviewed and evaluated. The potential of adopting nuclear desalination in Egypt has been discussed and evaluated from technical and economical points of view, with the emphasis on the recent desalination capabilities. The desalination techniques were assessed according to the size, type of the nuclear reactor, electrical and thermal energy capacity, based on several technical and economical criteria. From this study, it could be inferred that, RO and MSF plants, as well as hybrid systems, are considered as energy intensive processes where energy cost is a major controlling parameter in the overall cost of desalination. Oil prices instability affect to a large extent, the cost of desalination significantly, whereas NPPs offer long term availability of fuel as well as long term fuel price stability. It has also low environmental impacts compared with other conventional desalination processes.