SLIDE 6 5 Table 1.
Diablo Canyon Nuclear Power Plant Unit 1 Unit 2 Type Westinghouse 4-Loop PWR Westinghouse 4-Loop PWR Operation Since 1985 1986 License Expiration/Renewal Date 2024 2025 2010 Power Generation Capacity 1,122 MW(e) 1,118 MW(e)
Also notice in Table 1 that the Diablo Canyon units are due for license renewal in about a decade. The company that owns Diablo Canyon, Pacific Gas and Electric, has indicated that modifications will be made to the secondary cooling cycle of each unit upon license expiration. This information allows for the possibility of integrating the desalination plant to the nuclear reactor at this time. We have explored the feasibility of integration and recommend that a tertiary loop is installed (that is, with an additional heat exchanger) between that of the secondary loop and the jet ejector. Please refer to the Visio Process Flow Diagram in Appendix A for a schematic of this tertiary loop system. As a final remark on the Diablo Canyon recommendation, we note that both units are online solely to supply power to significant portion of Californian residents. Thus, co-generation of electrical power and potable water must be considered if the next step in this project includes Diablo Canyon’s reactors. A side note: Co-generation can be assisted by individual utilization of the reactor’s four loops towards one
DEEP/DE-TOP Plant Simulation The IAEA, International Atomic Energy Agency, has many resources for the conceptual design of nuclear desalination plants. From their website, we accessed the plant simulation tools DE-TOP and DEEP. DE- TOP stands for Desalination Thermodynamic Optimization Program, and is a beta tool, which means it has limited functionality for our purposes. The other program, DEEP, is a Desalination Economic Evaluation Program. While we have not yet been able to successfully modify the programs to our custom requirements, such as modeling the jet ejector in place of a low pressure turbine, we have used DEEP to do an economical comparison between Reverse Osmosis (RO), Multi-Effect Distillation (MED), and Multi-Stage Flash (MSF). Of these three technologies, the MED option with Vapor Compression cycle and an intermediate loop is most similar to our case. Figure 2 and 3 below show our results from DEEP. Notice that the cost of water and power production in Figure 2 (top left corner) have units of $/m3 and $/MWh, respectively, and cannot be applied directly to our process due to the differences in efficiency
- f our novel heat exchangers and jet ejectors.
Finally, we determined from DEEP that the incremental operating cost for the additional steam loop (tertiary loop) is an increase of ~$0.06/m3 = $0.22/kgal. This is a significant operating cost increase, as compared to the wholesale price of water to LA: $3.14/kgal. However, we maintain our recommendation due to the licensing issues of integration without this buffer loop
