(226c) Identifying Opportunities and Recommendations for the Integration of Nuclear Integrated Energy Systems with Industrial Heat Users

Idaho National Laboratory is developing a roadmap to identify and assist industrial heat and electricity users with decarbonization by integrating with nuclear power plants (NPPs) to provide clean, abundant, and dispatchable energy. This roadmap has a library of documents and models to guide various industries toward understanding nuclear technologies based on their needs. Considerations include specific industrial hazards which impact siting of an NPP, heat transport requirements and associated technologies, and implementation feasibility based on site-specific demand profiles. Facility process models are based on real data obtained from a survey of baseline requirements and process information (e.g., methods, quality, quantity of required heat inputs) of industrial facilities in the United States.

The industrial processes are prioritized by: operational heat characteristics that can be provided by nuclear systems, sufficient energy requirements to merit nuclear plant construction, and environmental benefit of replacing existing energy production with carbon-free nuclear power. Other decarbonization opportunities considered include the addition of nuclear-powered electrolysis processes for hydrogen-intense industries or high-temperature electric heating where thermal requirements exceed nuclear generation conditions. Through the selection of a few technologies, INL will focus on documenting and characterizing selected technologies to develop preliminary but detailed information of what energy streams within the industrial process may be replaced by a nuclear source. To promote integrated energy system deployments, the identification of generalized requirements within specific industries will support preliminary designs for thermal and electrical integration of nuclear power with industrial applications.