Foundation independent designs
One of the major efforts in building any power plant is building the foundation. Most power plants can require both modification of the foundation plan and the plant equipment to deal with the existing a terrain and soil. Most designs are done on both the underlying soil to create a foundation and on the structures and equipment.
In a foundation independent design all the modification is done under the foundations, setting up standard foundation tops that ideally do not require modification to the structures or equipment.
This means uniform factory component can be installed in the same way on every foundation. This can lead to factory testing. From this shift the amount of on-site testing and adjustment can be reduced. Which should reduce the skilled plant labor’s on-site time, and the time from delivery to commissioning can be reduced.
Also, if it is done right, larger manufactured components can be delivered on site and be placed on the foundation. More units can be in process at one time, since there are more skilled geo-technical teams than there are skill plant construction teams.
Power Conversion.
Different types of cycles will have different theoretical limits for the power output of the plant.
Those cycles include the Rankin cycle (steam boiler), which has a theoretical efficiency of up to 60%, but seldom reaches 45% in the real world. The Brayton cycle (gas turbine) is theoretically beyond 60% in a perfect world but seldom reaches 50% in the real world. The Carnot is theoretically the best cycle in physics but has never reached its theoretical potential at a large commercial scale. For light water reactors, likely the Rankin cycle will end up being the basis of power conversion. For HTGR the Brayton cycle maybe the primary cycle and the Rankin cycle may form a secondary cycle, like combined cycle natural gas plants. With the higher starting temperatures, the overall efficiency may exceed 70% for the two cycles, and there may be enough residual heat to provide hot water heating for premises.
There are more cycles and possibilities that will be discussed when the series gets to specific designs. One option for some designs is to feed the reactor water vapor and use the high temperatures to create hydrogen.
SMR I - Announcement of Small Modular Reactor Series
SMR II - Major types of reactors
SMR III -Â Why is 300 megawatts the dividing line for SMR?
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