An evaluation of reactor cooling and coupled hydrogen production processes using the modular helium reactor

Application of gas-cooled Accelerator Driven System (ADS) transmutation devices to sustainable nuclear energy development

“…On the other hand, the maximum temperature allowed in the heat exchanger materials limits the temperature at the outlet of the core. Therefore, an outlet coolant temperature of 950°C was selected, as is proposed in the work carried out by authors from many international research projects (Harvego et al, 2006;Kunitomi et al, 2004). A thermo-hydraulic analysis has been done in three main scenarios: at Beginning of Operation (BO), when the core is filled with fresh fuel at the first loading, at Beginning of Cycle (BOC), when discharge layers have completed a burn-up cycle and are substituted by fresh fuel, and at End of Cycle (EOC), after the 99 days burn-up period between refuelling.…”

“…The hydrogen production from nuclear heat is one of the options under study to reach the target of generating free-CÜ2 hydrogen and many projects has been initiated for that purpose (Verfondern and Von Lensa, 2005), exploring various methods to use nuclear heat or electricity for hydrogen generation, including high temperature thermochemical processes (Harvego et al, 2006), or high temperature electrolysis (Utgikar and Thiesen, 2006). The hydrogen production scheme evaluated in this paper is based on a gas-cooled subcritical pebble-bed transmutation concept (Abánades and Pérez-Navarro, 2007) driven by a proton accelerator.…”

Power cycle assessment of nuclear high temperature gas-cooled reactors

“…Sometimes different power cycle configurations can be coupled to the same nuclear system depending on applications. Thus, the MHR [16] (Modular Helium Reactor), as other HTGRs, is a good candidate to produce hydrogen and its cycle configuration will be different depending on the technology to be used, either thermo-chemical cycles or high temperature electrolysis.…”

Hydrogen production by high temperature electrolysis coupled with an EPR, SFR or HTR: techno-economic study and coupling possibilities

“…Harvego et al (2006) studied the coupling of a Modular Helium Reactor (MHR) of 600 MW th coupled with the HTE process. However, hydrogen production by different kinds of high temperature nuclear reactors has been evaluated.…”