Coupling of SMART and desalination plant

SMART is an integral type advanced pressurized water reactor with a thermal capacity of 330MW which is developed for the dual application of seawater desalination and small-scale electricity generation. The integrated SMART nuclear desalination plant aims to produce 40,000 m3/day of potable water and about 90 MW of electricity. The objective of this CRP is to establish a set of optimal coupling parameters between SMART and the desalination plant which satisfies the diverse operational and safety requirements imposed by water production and electricity generation and while retaining economic advantages of the use of nuclear energy. During the previous 4-year period of the project (1998-2002), the major coupling parameters were identified and the sensitivity analysis of these coupling parameters on plant performance were conducted. Also, a series of economic evaluation was carried out for the various combinations of the coupling schemes. Based on these results, the desalination process and the coupling scheme were selected and the optimization study on the coupling parameters has been conducted for the selected coupling scheme. In addition, the safety of the integrated SMART nuclear desalination plant was evaluated through the bounding approach of the key safety parameters of SMART and the work to simulate the contaminant migration from reactor to the product water was conducted. During the final year (2003), the works to finalize the optimal coupling between SMART and the desalination plant was conducted. The major coupling parameters and the interfacing conditions were confirmed by reviewing the basic design data of the integrated SMART nuclear desalination plan. Also, a simulation of the contaminant migration from reactor to the product water was conducted utilizing modeling tool DESNU developed by INVAP. General-purpose thermal hydraulic computer code RETRAN-03 was used to simulate the postulated multiple failure of isolation barriers between SMART and the desalination plant. In addition, some works for final report preparation have been conducted