RESULTS FROM THE EUROPEAN NC2I-R PROJECT ON NUCLEAR COGENERATION WITH HIGH TEMPERATURE REACTORS

Nuclear reactors deliver large amounts of electricity with a very small footprint of CO2 and other noxious emissions. Industry is still a significant source of emissions, responsible for about 24% of EU’s consumption of fossil fuels and concomitant emission of CO2. Therefore, for a CO2 curbing policy to be successful, it must include the reduction of fossil fuel use in industry. This would also help avoid issues related to "carbon leakage", loss of tax income and jobs, and it would enhance energy security. Expansion of nuclear power in this new market would provide substantial environmental, economic, societal and geopolitical benefits which go way beyond pure classical economic analysis, e.g. in the form of LCOE. The NC2I-R project was run from 2013 to 2015, co-financed by the European Commission and was an "executive" project of the European nuclear stakeholder platform SNETP and specifically one of its pillars, the Nuclear Cogeneration Industrial Initiative (NC2I). Building on an earlier project called EUROPAIRS, NC2I-R has first clarified the NC2I governance. This was important to establish NC2I as an interlocutor for national and European programs, industrial stakeholders and regional/national authorities. A large activity consisted in drawing an inventory of all infrastructures and competences which are crucial for the establishment of new nuclear cogeneration, both at the scale of demonstration and of industrial deployment. This stock-taking spanned in particular the EU, but also reached out to selected countries overseas where use of nuclear cogeneration was/is industrial practice or planned for the future. A second large activity investigated the requirements regarding the licensing process, safety demonstration and R&D needs of a nuclear co-generation system. Technology state-of-the-art and previous experience gained from licensing of existing and past nuclear cogeneration facilities in Europe and overseas were gathered and reviewed which led to a roadmap for licensing a new installation in Europe. Demonstration and deployment options for nuclear cogeneration were identified and modeled to evaluate and rank them according to industrial and/or policy-driven interests. More detailed economics analyses were performed including sensitivity studies. These included factors influencing the economics & financing, and conditions of economic viability. General specifications for a demonstrator program including siting were defined, and the most promising chemical industry sites in Europe were mapped. As nuclear cogeneration is still a little known technology, NC2I-R emphasized communication and dissemination of the results to European and non-European audiences: nuclear and conventional industry including the NGNP Industry Alliance in the US, safety organizations, international institutions (OECD/NEA, IAEA, GIF), and the general public. This paper delivers the key results from the NC2I-R project and outlines the way forward for successful demonstration and deployment of nuclear cogeneration technology with High Temperature Reactors.

JACKOWSKI Tomasz;  PRZYBYSZEWSKA Anna;  WROCHNA Grzegorz;  BAUDRAND Olivier;  FUETTERER Michael;  PLET Pierre-Marie;  ROELOFS Ferry;  CHAUVET Vincent;  AURIAULT Camille;  HITTNER Dominique;  TUOMISTO H.;  STAHL Riitta; 

2016-12-16

American Nuclear Society (ANS)

JRC102472