Enhanced CANDU reactor with heat upgrade for combined power and hydrogen production

• Published in: International journal of hydrogen energy 2019-09, Vol.44 (42), p.23580-23588
• Main Authors: El-Emam, Rami S., Dincer, Ibrahim, Zamfirescu, Calin
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Cu-Cl cycle; Heat pump; Heat upgrade; Hydrogen production; Nuclear power
• ISSN: 0360-3199; 1879-3487
• DOI: 10.1016/j.ijhydene.2019.06.181

Nuclear energy is considered a key alternative to overcome the environmental issues caused by fossil fuels. It offers opportunities with an improved operating efficiency and safety for producing power, synthetic fuels, delivering process heat and for multigeneration applications. The high-temperature nuclear reactors, although possess great potential for integration with thermochemical water-splitting cycles for hydrogen production, are not yet commercially established. Current nuclear reactor designs providing heat at relatively low temperature can be utilized to produce hydrogen using thermochemical cycles if the temperature of their thermal heat is increased. In this paper, a hybrid chemical-mechanical heat pump system is proposed for upgrading the heat of the Enhanced CANDU (EC6) reactor design to the quality required for the copper-chlorine (Cu–Cl) hybrid thermochemical water splitting cycle operating at 550–600 °C. A modification to the heat pump is proposed to bring the heat to temperature higher than 650 °C with operating coefficient of performance estimated as 0.65. •Upgrade of waste heat from EC6 reactor is feasible using chemical heat pumps.•High-temperature process heat can be produced at over 550 °C and up to 800 °C.•The proposed heat upgrading option is more promising than conventional electric heating.