Techno-economic assessment of coupling Hybrid MED-TVC and RO Desalination System with VVER-1000 Power Plants

This paper provides a techno-economic assessment of coupling VVER-1000 Power Plants and hybrid desalination processes, including MED-TVC and RO systems, with a total 100,000 m3/day freshwater capacity. DEEP and DE-TOP tools initially developed by IAEA for evaluating nuclear desalination projects are used here. To reduce the environmental effect of rejecting waste brine and increasing the efficiency of the RO system, in the proposed hybrid desalination system, the waste of MED-TVC is used as the feed water of the RO system. DE-TOP obtained the most efficient extraction steam point to supply MED-TVC system with 90MWth at the point with a pressure of 1.1 MPa and mass flux of 121 kg/s. An intermediate circuit is considered to ensure there will be no contamination into the produced water to comply with IAEA safety requirements. In this manner, the power plant's cogeneration efficiency reaches 33% to 34%. Furthermore, the financial results show freshwater's levelized cost is almost 1.06 $/m3.