Prospects for Nuclear District Heating Based on Power-Generating Units with Capacity up to 100 MW

Abstract

The main objective of this research is to make a preliminary evaluation of the effective scales of application of nuclear district heating based on units with capacity to 100 MW for supplying energy to cities in the unified power system of Russia. The regions where nuclear district heating is economically efficient but the strong dependence of the results on changes in multiple factors still does not permit significant scales of adoption before 2030 are shown. A series of works on determining the effective areas of application of nuclear heat and power plants (NHPP) based on small power-generating units (to 100 MW) in period to 2030 was conducted at the Energy Research Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences (INEI RAN), in 2012‐2013. Since the power-generating units are under development and only preliminary technical-economic indices are available, the present article examines small conventional nuclear power plants, which are strongly distinguished by their characteristics (Table 1). In addition, because of the high uncertainty the most important ones, first and foremost, the specific capital investment, are examined in a wide range. In this study, the application of NHPPs is limited to supplying energy to cities with more than 100,000 people within the territory of the unified energy system of Russia. In addition, in cities only the increase in the thermal load of public utilities and services, i.e., the thermal load of new residential regions, is examined; the possibility of using NHPPs to satisfy the existing public and commercial thermal load is not analyzed. The investigation is conducted for the predesign efficiency evaluation stage, which makes it possible to ignore particular cities and combine all cities into a small number of typical groups in each region of the country. The cities are divided into six typical groups on the basis of the increase in the thermal load of public utilities and services (Table 2). The possibility of using NHPPs is not considered in group-0 cities with load increase less than 86 Gcal/h or in group-V cities which include Moscow and St. Petersburg. In each typical group of cities, it is not particular sources of energy that are analyzed but rather only typical schemes for supplying energy: combined on the basis of typical dual-block heat and electric power plants (HPP) or nuclear heat and power plants (NHPP) with co-generation factor α = 0.5 and separate based on typical boilers burning fossil fuels and large (system-wide) condensation electric power plants (NPP, coal-, or gas-fired CPP). For each type of city group, a unique correspondence is established between the increase in the fuel load and the thermal power of the generating sources, claiming to meet the load. A simplified approach to determining the increase in the thermal load of cities is presented in [1]. The forecast showed that of 160 cities the thermal load in 2013‐2030 will exceed 86 Gcal/h in only 123 and it is possible to locate