Thermal energy storage in rock chambers - a complement to nuclear power

Within about a decade from now, the nuclear capacity on several generation systems will have become larger than the night load, thus increasing the incentive to exploit cheap night energy for daily storage schemes. In Sweden, energy storage schemes using rock cavities have been studied for a number of years. These include pumped storage schemes with lower magazines well below ground surface and gas turbine schemes with compressed air magazines. Recently preliminary studies have been made of a third form - that of storing hot high pressure water in rock cavities with a simple thermal insulation. One method of utilizing this water is as feed water for a nuclear power station, the water in the store being heated from about 73 ° C to 21 7°C at night, and the stored hot water being fed directly to the Nuclear Steam Supply System (NSSS) during the day. An increase in turbine output by about 25% can then be achieved at peak periods due to the elimination of the h.p. steam bleeding for unchanged reactor power. About 35 kWh of electricity can be recovered per m3 of storage volume, i.e. 30 times as much as if one m3 of cold water had been allowed to descend 450 m under gravity to the lower magazine of a pumped storage plant. This illustrates how much more effective hot water storage utilizes the space of a rock cavity than does cold water storage for a pumped storage plant even at very great depths. The paper describes the circuit proposed and the design of the accumulator to meet the requirements concerning thermal insulation (to avoid exposing the rock walls to daily temperature cycles), avoidance of risk of leakage of slightly active feed water to the surrounding ground water even under severe accident conditions such as pipe and tank ruptures, and water chemistry to avoid water containing impurities or dissolved gases from reaching the feed water circuit. A preliminary cost analysis is given which shows that the proposal allows the generation of additional blocks of peak load power at annual load factors of 15 to 40% at generation costs which are about half that of the best fossile fuel plants at typical fossile fuel costs. (author)