Potential of applying liquid air energy storage to large-scale nuclear power plants for the APR1400 application

The cost of load-following is that it will bring problems in the equipment integrity as well as issues in economic and safety aspects. In order to solve the issue of intermittency using the conventional large scale nuclear power systems, research efforts shown in previous references have attempted to enable efficient load-following of NPPs. Various hybrid solutions using energy storage systems have been suggested, but in this research, the potential of adopting a novel concept of liquid air energy storage (LAES) is examined in this paper. Two main technologies considered for large-scale energy storage at the present are pumped hydropower and compressed air energy storage (CAES). However, they both suffer from geological restrictions, high capital costs, and negative environmental impact. LAES presents the advantages of having larger volumetric energy density as well as having no geological constraints. Hence, this concept can be integrated effectively with the large scale conventional NPPs in order to meet the demands of the transforming grid. The LAES system has been receiving much attention as the realistic alternative as a grid-scale energy storage system.