Assessment of Nuclear Energy to Support Negative Emission Technologies

Abstract

The feasibility and performance of nuclear energy coupled with Negative Emission Technology (NET) processes were investigated in this report. Three overarching questions from nuclear NET systems guided this research: which NET would be able to use heat and/or electricity from nuclear power plants (NPPs); what is the performance and cost of a nuclear NET system; and what would be the market outlook for this system? Among the various NETs that are actively being developed, several were found to potentially benefit from coupling with an NPP via (1) large amounts of decarbonized and constant-output electricity; (2) free waste heat or cheap low-temperature heat; or (3) high-temperature heat. NPPs were found to be compatible with Direct Air Capture (DAC) systems, and a detailed techno-economic analysis of coupled NPP&DAC systems was performed. Preliminary analysis also indicated that biomass and water-based NETs are potentially compatible with NPPs, but further work is needed to quantify the performance of these nuclear NET systems. Design and performance analyses were completed for both liquid solvent DAC (L-DAC) and solid sorbent DAC (S-DAC) technologies. A 1.0-GWth NPP coupled with L-DAC and S-DAC was found to be able to capture 12–15 Mt CO 2 /yr and 1.0–1.5 Mt CO 2 /yr, respectively. While the L-DAC process enables much greater CO 2 capture than the S-DAC process when both are sized with a 1 GWth NPP, the NPP&L-DAC system considered also requires >2 GWth natural gas oxy-combustion to reach adequate temperature in the calciner. CO 2 generated from natural gas combustion is also captured as part of the calcination process, in addition to the CO 2 captured from air, resulting in overall CO 2 sequestration of close to 30% more than what is captured from air. The cost of carbon capture calculated with the levelized cost of DAC (LCOD) had a range of $\$170–260$/tCO 2 for NPP&L-DAC systems and a range of $\$650–680$/tCO 2 for NPP&S-DAC systems. For both DAC systems, the NPP provides economic benefit when compared to previous National Energy Technology Laboratory (NETL) studies of non-nuclear DAC systems, leading to reduction of LCOD by 5–7% for L-DAC, and 8–13% for S-DAC. For the NPP&DAC systems, a preliminary market analysis reviewed potential CO 2 market prices and eligibility for incentives. The estimated potential revenues for CO 2 capture (coming from federal incentive, CO 2 commodity markets, or offset market) is in the range of $\$170–979$ tCO 2 , and the results show that because of lower LCOD, the NPP&L-DAC process would be more attractive to a market than the NPP&S-DAC process. The large investment needed for NPP&DAC processes would require long-term certainty of sufficient market size, CO 2 prices, and incentives. Enabling NPPs to ramp DAC operation up or down based on electricity market price is not expected to significantly increase revenues of the NPP&DAC system. This is because the revenues from CO 2 sequestration are required to be very high to justify the deployment and continuous operation of the very expensive DAC technologies. In this analysis, several new research questions were uncovered, and follow-up analyses are recommended for further investigation, including a detailed feasibility study of NPP coupled with other NET systems such as biomass pyrolysis and gasification with carbon capture and storage, and seawater carbon capture.