3 ms·
Yes, the typical nuclear power plant’s reactor tops out at 350C, which is well below the desired temperature of 550C in a coal plant. But you wouldn’t want to u
by fwlr 3y ago
Yes, the typical nuclear power plant’s reactor tops out at 350C, which is well below the desired temperature of 550C in a coal plant. But you wouldn’t want to use an existing LWR anyway, they are massive (1GW+) relative to a coal plant which usually wants either 100-200MW per small unit or 500-600MW per large unit.
For a retrofit project you would use a liquid metal cooled reactor, almost certainly sodium metal since this is a fairly well-proven nuclear technology. LMRs give you the 550C outlet temperature that coal plants want.
If you’re building a nuclear power plant from scratch, water-cooled reactors are ideal for several reasons, and so we mostly chose to build LWRs (and thus LWRs became the most proven nuclear technology, which means we chose LWRs even more often…). But they are not the only type of reactor out there.
- pfdietz 3y agoIt would be simpler (and perhaps even overall more economic) to just replace the coal-fired boiler with a resistively heated thermal store. This would not generate energy, just store it (rather inefficiently), but the marginal cost need not be very high.
- fwlr 3y agoIf downgrading from power generation to power storage is an acceptable outcome, it would be more efficient to decommission the turbines along with the coal boiler, and just plug a large battery into the remaining transmission infrastructure.
- pfdietz 3y agoEfficient? Yes. Cheap? No. The cost of slapping a thermal store onto existing steam turbines could be very low. This would be much more economically effective for longer term (like, ~1 week) storage than batteries. The round trip efficiency could be increased by adding a gas turbine topping cycle.