Advanced nuclear reactor technology integrated with on site hydrogen production enhances the flexibility and economic viability of nuclear power in the United States

Nuclear Integrated Energy System with Thermal Energy Storage and Hydrogen Production

Team: Seth Dana, Jacob Bryan, Hailei Wang

Motivation

  • Increased renewable energy installment has created a volatile electrical energy market.
  • Natrium by GE and TerraPower is an advanced nuclear plant design with thermal energy storage that increases plant flexibility.
  • This poster demonstrates how green hydrogen production can integrate with the Natrium design to further boost plant flexibility and economic viability.

Methods

  • Dynamic system modeling using Dymola/Modelica coupled with synthetic time series
  • Net Present Value (NPV) used as economic metric for optimization.
  • HERON from INL facilitates bi-level stochastic optimization of system component sizing and energy dispatch.
flowchart
Original Demand Processing

[1]

Natrium System
Diagram
H2 Price

Results

  • The synthetic time series of energy price captures uncertainty in calculated NPV values.
  • The dispatch optimization is driven by the energy price and it utilized energy storage to operate plant to maximize NPV.

California

California graph

Texas

Texas graph

Midwest States

Midwest States graph

[1] Talbot, P, et al., “Correlated Synthetic Time Series Generation for Energy System Simulations Using Fourier and ARMA Signal Processing”, Int. Journal of Energy Research