Power plant land availability constraints on waste heat utilization

An assessment of land available at nuclear power stations was performed in an effort to determine the limitations land availability would impose on the implementation of reject-heat-utilization systems. A waste-heat-utilization factor was defined for all operating and planned nuclear power stations for which a Preliminary Safety Analysis Report had been filed. This factor is the percentage of the station's reject heat that could be utilized on the land available for such use at the site. The results indicate that reject heat from 115,000 MW(e) of generating capacity could be utilized on the land which is available. The results further indicate that about half of this potential implementation is at stations that have enough land to accommodate waste heat utilization systems sized to use all of the stations' reject heat. Utilization of the remaining 50% is about equally distributed among sites capable of using between 10 and 90% of their reject heat. Further, it seems reasonable that for many applications an integrated waste heat complex, using several waste heat technologies, will be required to avoid marketing problems. It also appears that single application systems will be important for the sites that can use only a small fraction of their total reject heat.