TEPLATOR: Nuclear district heating solution

The innovative concept for district and process heat production is presented using already irradiated nuclear fuel from commercial light water power reactors where this fuel is not burnt up to its regulatory and design limits. The TEPLATOR is a critical assembly derived by the state of the art computational tools using better moderation, more optimal fuel lattice pitch, lower fuel temperature, lower coolant pressure for producing commercial heat with a cost of less than 4 EUR/GJ. Investment cost for building the TEPLATOR district heating station is below 30M EUR (for both using prices of 2019). Based on different district heating needs, different TEPLATOR variants are proposed; using either used BWR, PWR or VVER irradiated fuel assemblies (FAs). TEPLATOR can also be operated with fresh fuel if the stockpile of irradiated FAs is exhausted. TEPLATOR DEMO variant (a.k.a. DEMO) is a 50 MWt district heating plant using 55 FAs from VVER- 440, producing 98 °C hot water. DEMO is coupled to a thermal storage system allowing shaving off morning and evening district heating peaks. DEMO coolant is used at atmospheric pressure, the system has three loops, three main circulation pumps, three heat exchangers and heat generation is regulated by standard control mechanisms. TEPLATOR variants using BWR and PWR square lattice fuel were also considered using different core configurations though. The engineering constraints show potential for a higher output ( < 250 MWt) and/or higher temperatures ( < 200 °C) as customers require. The TEPLATOR solutions is especially suitable for countries that have thousands FAs stored either in interim storage casks or spent fuel pools. These FAs are now financial liability which, once used for heat production, can turn into a sizeable financial asset.