Comparative Analysis of Hybrid Desalination Technologies Powered by SMR

Abstract

Small modular reactors (SMRs) represent a key area of interest to nuclear industry developers, which have been making significant progress during the past few years. Generally, these reactors are promising owing to their improved safety due to passive systems, enhanced containment efficiency, and fewer capital costs in comparison to traditional nuclear reactors. An important advantage of SMRs is their adaptability in being coupled to other energy-consuming systems, such as desalination plants (DPs) to create a cogeneration plant. Considering the serious challenges regarding the freshwater shortage in many regions of the world and the necessity of using low-carbon energy sources, it is advantageous to use SMR for supplying the required heat and electricity of DPs. As a high-performance desalination technology, the hybrid desalination (HD) systems can be exploited, which retain the advantages of both thermal and membrane desalination methods. In this study, several SMR coupling schemes to HD plants have been suggested. In performing a thermodynamic analysis of integrated SMR-DP, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) Desalination Thermodynamic Optimization Program (DE-TOP) has been utilized. It has been found that the use of relatively hot water from the SMR condenser leads to about 6.5 to 7.5% of total desalination cost reduction, where the produced electricity and hot steam extracted from low-pressure turbine were used to drive the HD system.

Feasibility of Hybrid Desalination Plants Coupled with Small Gas Turbine CHP Systems

“…The total annual cost of the plant is the summation of several components such as annual fuel cost, annual operation and maintenance (O & M) cost, and annual capital cost. Hence, the fuel cost indirectly affected the total cost of the produced freshwater [24]. According to Figure 3, the total cost of the produced water for each method is composed of several contributions, namely, capital cost, heat cost, electricity cost, and operating and maintenance costs.…”

“…The total annual cost of the plant is the summation of several components such as annual fuel cost, annual operation and maintenance (O & M) cost, and annual capital cost. Hence, the fuel cost indirectly affected the total cost of the produced freshwater [24].…”

“…Hence, the capital cost of the thermal plant was larger than that of the RO plant and, consequently, the total cost of the hybrid system was larger. Certainly, by increasing the capacity of the plant (for example, a large-scale desalination plant with capacity of 100,000 m 3 /day), the total cost of the hybrid plant will decrease in comparison to a stand-alone RO desalination plant [23,24]. The graphical representation of the results obtained for the hybrid systems is given in Figure 4.…”

“…For all the stated reasons, the obtained freshwater costs from thermal desalination units will be competitive with those produced by RO technology. In this paper, while the authors refer to their earlier works [4,6,[20][21][22][23][24][25], the focus is different, since the design process is applied to small CHP power plants intended for off-grid applications. In the next section, the proposed system is presented and deeply described, while in the following part of this paper, some economic analysis is presented in order to evaluate the cost of produced water.…”

Assessment of a Geothermal Combined System with an Organic Rankine Cycle and Multi-effect Distillation Desalination

“…More broadly, Kilkis et al (2020) and Rezaie and Rosen (2020) investigated the importance of water systems and their integration with energy and environment systems. Specific studies have been undertaken on solar desalination systems (Aboelmaaref et al 2020;Tong et al, 2020), photovoltaics (Anand et al 2021;Wu et al 2021), high-temperature geothermal energy (Abdolalipouradl et al 2020;Farsi and Dincer 2019;Gnaifaid and Ozcan 2021), ambient ground energy sources (Rosen and Koohi-Fayegh 2017;Alavy et al 2021), solar ponds (Kasaeian et al 2018Mosaffa and Farshi 2021), and nuclear energy (Khan et al 2017;Ghazaie et al 2020;Marques et al 2020). Technologies have also received attention that facilitate the use of sustainable energy, like energy storage (Cuce et al 2020;Campione et al 2020;Koohi-Fayegh and Rosen 2020;Dincer and Rosen 2021a), cogeneration, and district energy (Rosen and Koohi-Fayegh 2016).…”