 Can you see the presentation? I cannot share my screen at the moment, because I think you're still sharing. Wait a second, wait a second, Nikoleta, good morning. So now we continue this presentation by Nikoleta Marilova. Repurposing size of fossil plants with advanced nuclear reactors. Let me just quickly introduce Nikoleta. She was working with IEA the second year already. And the first reactor technology development team. Nikoleta receives her PhD from Karlsruhe Institute of Technology in National Sciences in 2022, just last year. And then he started her work in the IEA. Also, Nikoleta receives her Master of Science from Akol Polytechnica Federale de Lasagna, EPFL, and from Power Shredder Institute in Nuclear Engineering in 2016. Okay, Nikoleta, welcome to the workshop. Hello. Please start your presentation. I will stop sharing now, and you will have a chance. Thank you. Just a second. I will probably first make full screen presentation, and then return to this Zoom browser window and start sharing window with full screen. Okay, one second. So can you see this full screen, okay? This is not full screen, I believe, so this is like standard PowerPoint window, I think you start full screen. Okay, you stop, then you start full screen, then you return to the browser window and start sharing and select full screen window. That's the way. So you say first full screen, and then share. Then I'll tap back to the browser window and start sharing and select this full screen window to share. Okay, again, so let's try to, you simply just try to maximize this window and then go because it doesn't work like this somehow. Maybe because it's different. And now? Yes, yes, now perfect, perfect, perfect, Nikoleta. Okay, great. So Radis, so hello everybody. Today I will be presenting a lecture on rather a novel concept, repurposing sites of fossil plants with advanced nuclear reactors. Now this lecture is more of an overview of this concept and recent developments in this area, and I hope it can turn into an interesting discussion with you all. It is not really a novel concept. It was mentioned in the literature already in 2012, but most of the efforts, the evaluations and financing really started last year in 2021. So what is this concept really about? A call to nuclear transition means citing a nuclear reactor at the site of a retired coal power plant. Now, as we'll see later, it is not necessarily restricted to coal power plant. It may be also oil or natural gas plant, but at the moment the spotlight is on coal plants. Across the globe, the communities and the energy industry are working to decarbonize the energy generation and consumption and implementing actions to achieve net zero emissions, zero carbon emission goals. Therefore the environmental and climate change concerns place more and more pressure on utility plant owners to retire the coal power plants. Also increasing number of coal power plants retirement has been seen across the globe, across many countries to support these lower carbon plants. Now as the nations around the world increase their climate ambitions and accelerate their plans to decarbonize, what we can see in this figure one showing the number of countries with net zero commitments versus the share of the CO2 emissions, the next decade and beyond will bring the prospect of increased deployment of nuclear power as we need to cover the retired capacity of this base load energy. The International Energy Agency Net Zero by 2050 roadmap also projects that the nuclear electricity generation will need to double between 2020 and 2050 if the world is to meet its net zero ambitions. We'll have around 550 gigabit of new nuclear capacity which will be needed by 2050. So some of the key points I would just like to mention are the following nuclear energy is key to achieving global net zero objectives, working in partnership with renewable energy sources and other low carbon options as part of a sustainable energy system to decarbonize electricity and also non-electric energy production. Now the nuclear power can help complement and integrate the expected large share of renewable generation by ensuring 24-7 energy supply reliability and dispatchability. The matching low carbon generating capacity is essential and by safety extending the operational lifetimes of existing nuclear power plants as well. As many nations opt for nuclear energy to meet their climate objectives it is also important to note that other low carbon energy technologies are also expected to deliver a bulk of the carbonization in particular renewable technologies such as solar and wind which are also likely to be included in electricity mix as well as energy storage technologies and other low carbon fields such as hydrogen for example. So nuclear power can help to complement and integrate all these large shares and I have taken this figure from the IEA Nuclear Energy for Net Zero World Green Book also referenced here, it's a very good read. And in this green book which was published by the IEA after the COP26 it is highlighted how the nuclear power plants can be envisaged as cost-effective solution for replacing or called repowering coal plants. Now at the agency we have also conducted a webinar on this topic called Repurposing Fossil Fuel Power Plant Sites with SMRs to East Clean Energy Transitions and we had five experts, we had experts from US, India, Romania, UK and France which provided their insights on this topic for the first time here at the agency and many information was presented at this webinar so I will also get back to that a little bit later. So let's discuss what type of advanced reactors are best for this repurposing approach. So here we have SMRs for coal-to-nuclear C2N, this is the shortcut that is being used for this approach. One of the new nuclear technologies being developed is the SMRs. React to design to reach the market and economically and safely make power. I mean there was already a whole lecture yesterday so I will just be brief and introduce only what is most relevant for this concept. So to reduce the direct cost and to ease the connection to the grid the SMRs capacities are limited to approximately 300 megawatt electric which is less than one-third of the size of a conventional NPP but it's similar in output to many conventional coal boilers. So this reduces the physical size and simplifies manufacturing even allowing for the factory assembly. SMRs are typically designed to be very simple and to use passive systems to further reduce the complexity and facilitate high levels of safety. Using the multiple modular small and safe reactors allows the NPP to be scaled to meet the local needs and to support the power generations for applications which are beyond the electricity generation. As we know also the increased safety reduces the size of the emergency planning zones and that allows for easier sighting. These technological advancements provide more certainty in the NPP development and deployment time and costs. So the collective benefit from the SMRs designs promises low cost and safe operation. Now I have put a question mark here because the NPPs are always running over budget and over time so here I would like to see the final cost once an SMR is already deployed and then we can say that it is really low cost. These all these attributes make SMRs and advance reactors of particular interest when considering this coal power plant to nuclear power plant conversion. The reuse size also allows for flexible deployment options since physically smaller reactors, less material. Nikoleta, we cannot hear you. We cannot hear you. Could you check the connection? We cannot hear you. Now yes. Keep speaking. Now yes? Yes, now it's okay. Please go ahead. So you just lost me now? As I said, so the smaller reactors have reduced nuclear material inventories making sighting easier and as all the components will be combined in a single pressure vessel. Also these integrated designs tend to incorporate passive systems like natural secretions and so on. So this is why the SMRs are now highly discussed for this. Now let's discuss the benefits of coal to nuclear. Excuse me. We lost your screen. We can hear you but we don't see the screen. Can you see this now? Now it's okay. So let's discuss the benefits of this coal to nuclear concept. One must know that the technical differences between the coal power plants and the nuclear power plants exist and this must be considered to identify the right candidate coal plants and sites for this transformation. That's not every coal plant we can just pick and repurpose. So if this plan is feasible, the benefits we gain are the following. So of course the low carbon emissions, reuse of infrastructure such as roads, warehouses, administrative buildings and potentially more if the plant is really being repurposed and not just the site or just around the plant. Then of course the reuse of transmissions and grids as the small modular reactors have also similar outputs as many coal plants. As mentioned in a previous slide around 300 megawatt electric. Now the job retention is very important. As many times the coal plant is employing a huge part of the local community and retiring a coal plant would have a very negative impact on the lives of the workers and this community because of the high loss of the jobs in the area. Now retraining of the workers may be needed in certain areas such as maintenance of specialized equipment and reactor operator of course, nuclear engineers but many other jobs may be retained in engineering, project management, maintenance, operations and other support functions. The next benefit is retaining the value of the assets as approximately 200 coal power plants shut down between 2010 and 2019. The average power capacity was about 200 megawatt electric and these retired plants in 2010 were on average 20 years older than the ones retired in 2018. So the average age of plants being retired is now comparable to the age of the operating fleet. As well the average power of the retired plants has increased over the years and the average power in the current operating coal power plant fleet is about 350 megawatt electric. So these plants retirement appear to be removing the older and lower power units, preferentially increasing the viability of the remaining fleet. So going forward the retirements of these larger and newer coal power plants are to be expected and the newer power plants will have newer components and potentially therefore higher value in their relatively new equipment. So retaining the increased plant value and the eccentric value of the site should provide also with more incentive to repower and repurpose rather just than to retire completely the plants. And at last since I mentioned before the negative or the complaint about nuclear is the slow construction and deployment as well as the high capital cost, the repurposing approach will provide for faster deployment lower construction costs. But of course these exact numbers for the costs are more on the case by case basis for this repurposing. So who can benefit from this approach? Now as of 2022 the world has more than two terawatt electric of coal fired plant generating about 12 gigaton of CO2 emissions per year which is amounting to almost one third of the global total forecast net annual emissions of approximately 40 gigaton per year. Now let's look at the few countries which could benefit from this concept. So in this graph we can see the countries energy mix from the year 2021 and you can see in this graph the order is from the decreasing contribution of coal in the energy mix of these countries. First with the countries that have nuclear in the energy mix and then in the rectangle you can see the same. So decreasing of the coal contributions but in the countries that do not yet have nuclear power. So you can see in the orange coal and the red oil are in the yellow gas which will also be important and in the blue nuclear and the remaining is either renewables or others such as bio. In some US coal plants have been actually converted to natural gas to reduce the production cost and reduce the carbon emissions and to avoid required emissions upgrade by using a more efficient heat source and while this is definitely a positive step forward it may in some years be preferable to also convert these plants to nuclear power plants so to achieve because of course they are also from the gas plants so in order to achieve the net zero commitments they may anyway decide to convert this to nuclear. So the step to call to nuclear directly will get rid of this intermediate step. So as I said you can see also the significant contributions from not so much oil but really gas also in this graph for many countries. So I would like to now introduce you a few cases in countries already taking concrete step in this approach such as US for example or countries that would highly benefit from this approach such as India or Poland. Also during our recent conference at the agency we had a speaker from South Africa and she also mentioned that she thinks that the country might really consider adopting this approach as well which is very interesting because as you can see this is really the first country here with really really high coal contribution in the energy mix. So I personally think that once this concept is proven where we really have a repurposed coal plant maybe more countries would follow and express interest. So I would like to start with the US case. Currently in the US we have about 110 coal plants operating that are planned for retirement by 2014 and from this it's 100, this will be 120 KW of electricity capacity that would need to be replaced hopefully by advanced nuclear reactors. This would then amount for 1 billion tons of carbon dioxide per year that would be eliminated and repurposing these plants would also amount to 1.5 billion hours of construction employment and 35,000 power plant jobs and 32,000 manufacturing jobs. So one plant that is this concept is called Natrium Plant which is by Terra Power Company and this Natrium technology is a 345 megawatt sodium ultrafast reactor with a molten salt based integrated energy storage system which is planned in camera in Wyoming USA and it is planned at the site of a retired coal plant not a coal plant. And this power plant is according to the company estimated to be completed by 2028. The financing for this plant came from the US Department of Energy with so called Advanced Reactor Demonstration Program which set to commit nearly 2 billion dollars and Terra Power matched dollar for dollar. Now the power output here is a little bit higher than this number that we keep hearing for SMRs 300 megawatts. So that is always open to interpretation maybe Chirayu who is an SMR expert can say whether this is still an SMR. So the difference is that the majority of this discussed SMRs concepts are water cooled reactors and this is interestingly a sodium cooled fast reactor which means that this project will also build the supply chain for sodium fast reactors in the US. The estimated jobs for this plant is 2,000 construction jobs and 250 jobs at the operational plant itself. So I would just say something briefly about the Norton power plant. So the advantages of this sodium plant as mentioned by Terra Power are that it has this flexible and small footprint and attractive size that the thermal storage has the potential to accommodate the system output to 500 megawatt electric of power for approximately five and a half hours when needed. And this flexibility to quickly load follow to accommodate the increased impact of solar and wind due to the molten salt storage system as well as the rapid construction as they mentioned this will be finished by 2028 which is really only five years away actually. Emergency planning zone at the site boundary. Inherent safety and also grid connection and at least transmission lines which are able to tie directly into the substation and the grid is already like ready for the power level. And at last the workforce since the local community is supportive and also available for the constructions and operations jobs. Regarding the cold plant that's being repurposed the Norton cold plant. So this is a three unit plant with total generating capacity of 700 megawatt. And the units one and two are coal fired and have capacity of approximately 450 megawatt while the unit three was converted to natural gas few years ago in 2019. So now we are discussing the units one and two which are set to retire in 2025. Now I would like to highlight here that the plant will not really directly replace the power plant but it will be located about four kilometers south of the power plant. This is due to the soil ground and water ash contamination as was discussed by the speaker from TerraPower during the webinar. And in this particular case they can reuse the workforce. As I said the roads, the water rights, the grid but if the plant is being repurposed directly next to the site we could reuse more of the infrastructure as well such as buildings and on site even more like cooling towers, generators and much more of the equipment. So there are of course more companies that are developing SMRs and also discussing the potential of this approach but I have for the US only presented now this one particular case. The second case I would like to highlight today is for Romania. Now in Romania in November 2021 the company Nutia Electrica, the Romanian company signed agreement with the US company New Scale Power to build a six-module OGR SMR with the capacity of 462 megawatt electric at the site of the former Dojcesti called Fired Power Plant. In this case the SMR is planned to repurpose directly the plant directly on site and the estimated cost of this project including construction and installation is approximately $1.6 billion and they also plan to complete it by the end of the decade. So far the mentioned cost savings, capital cost savings could be approximately on average about $100 million. Now this New Scale SMR Power Plant which can build on an existing coal power plant site they mention a very small land footprint of around 10 hectares and they can reuse the existing hard infrastructure such as cooling and potable water the site physical protection warehouses, buildings, grids, roads, etc. This is all supporting these projects and with this replacement of a coal plant with a comparable installed capacity by the New Scale SMR the power plant will require very little changes to the transmission systems if any according to the company. So regarding the capacity building for this case as I mentioned they want to retain the coal power plant workforce and mention that the many positions are directly transferable from coal to nuclear while other positions might need some cross-training. So of course this will then provide for a greater economic impact in the existing coal communities. I would also like to highlight that this year in August the agency has concluded a seed mission seed standing for the site and external events design review of the seed mission in Romania. And here the first European SMR should be built and this seed mission was also the first ever IEA seed mission to look into the site selection for an SMR. You can also see here and I put this link for this reference if you want to read more about the mission or about this particular case this is available here. The third case I would like to touch briefly is a country with a high potential for this approach India. Now what you see on this slide this is mostly the information that we was delivered by the Indian speaker during the IEA webinar and he has made some very interesting points and really also convincing of why this concept would be beneficial for India. As majority of the coal power plants are situated in India in zone with low seismic activity they can be replaced, repurposed with the nuclear power plants and India would most likely for water cooled technology as this technology would not require much more further investment in research as compared to the sodium cost of fast reactors which we have seen now is now the case in the US. Two things why this concept would be beneficial or two things that I could think of now are most likely the small exclusions on for this SMRs like we seen it was at the site of the boundary for Romania, the plant boundary and this can be interesting as due to the high population density in India. And the second would be the desalination of the clean drinking of the water so to supply the clean drinking water. It was reported by the predictions made by the government of India that India may be water stressed by 2050 and since India has about 6000 kilometers of coastline on the mainland and on this coastline there is about 20 coal fired plants 5 diesel power plants and 17 natural gas power plants instilling SMRs and having a desalination plant would be able to produce up to 900 cubic meter of clean water per megawatt electric. Now India was also second on the chart I have shown earlier and it has really a huge contribution of coal in their energy mix. So the last case I would like to mention today briefly is Poland. As we can see here they have at the moment no nuclear contribution in their energy mix a very high coal it's no secret very high coal contribution in their energy mix but they have also recently expressed interest in including nuclear. So why is it really interesting for them? Now there was this one case study one paper published this year really discussing the possibility for coal to nuclear for Poland so the power system in Poland is currently dominated by coal fired units which have reached an age and a technical condition where they will have to be gradually shut down in the coming years 2033 onward Poland intends to commission nuclear power plants and the installed capacity in 2043 is expected to be between 6 and 9 gigawatts. Now a double effect of decarbonization can be then achieved by nuclear powering of their coal fired plants with replacement of the coal boiler island with nuclear reactor systems. These repowered plants could then benefit if they would operate also with the thermal energy storage systems using molten salt. In this paper published in 2022 the authors were presenting a techno economic analysis of three cases if they would be repowering a 460 megawatt super critical coal fired unit in Poland and the authors have focused on assault cooled reactors in this study. So the retrofit would assume the replacement of the boiler island to be the system of nuclear reactors ensuring the production of heat for the needs of stiff generators and the authors considered three cases of the structure of the nuclear unit so the two would assume the operation of the system without its integration with the thermal energy systems thermal energy storage systems while one case involves also connecting two tanks for molten salt constituting the heat storage system between the nuclear island and the turbine island. So the first case assumes the use of a system of three KPFHR reactors standing for the kairos power fluoride cooled high temperature reactor so it's a reactor in the design and each of these would have a thermal capacity of 320 megawatt coming to total to about 960 megawatt which is very close to the nominal thermal power of the removed boiler. Now in this KPFHR reactor the two closed loops transfer heat from the reactors to the steam turbine we have a primary heat transfer system the flyby salt and in the intermediate heat transfer system so called solar salt is used and the temperature of the salt at the outlet of the reactor and at the inlet of the steam generator is set to 100 degrees celsius. Now this temperature means that this reactor can be considered for direct repowering of most super critical cold fired power units. This case was also the option with the highest investments cost of course because of the need to purchase and build the three nuclear reactors the second case considered in this study was similar to case one but the number of the reactors would reduce to two and the third case study used two nuclear reactors equipped with the molten salt thermal energy storage system as a buffer for the heat produced by the reactor system. So the authors have performed quite a detailed economic analysis where they refer to the issues of investment costs operating and maintenance costs and assumptions regarding construction times and operating times of the units that may be the result of the nuclear retrofits which would be carried out. So the result of this conducted analysis showed that the integration of the nuclear units with the TES systems may allow for a significant increase in the flexibility of electricity production with a simultaneous full use of the production potential of the nuclear reactors and this is of course desirable due to the significant share of the purchase costs of the reactors in the total investment costs. This economic analysis demonstrated that the integration with the TES system may be beneficial if considering the current levels of daily variation in electricity prices and in the current market conditions. This was the most attractive investment. This would be this case with the two reactors and the TES system capacity of 800 megawatt hour. So here also another approach was presented where perhaps this integration of this thermal energy system is something that may be adopted more in this repurposing approach and also in the US they also considered the molten salt storage in the natural plan. So we will see how this will develop. And before I conclude here is another sort of alternative as some countries with high contributions from nuclear and their energy mix such as France for example or Slovakia as you can see in this graph may consider repurposing coal plants to actually replace their retiring nuclear power plants with new nuclear power plants either with advanced reactors of their own designs whether that is SMR or another type of advanced nuclear reactors. So I would like to mention again if you would like to watch a webinar where this topic is really discussed with experts from different countries then here is also the link available and so thank you very much for your kind attention. This would now conclude my lecture on this overview of this concept and if we have few minutes I would like to even discuss with you all about this topic as I would be really interested what is your opinion whether you think that this concept can be applicable in your countries you come from many different countries and you may have also different insights so I will then stop sharing my screen. Thank you very much Nikoleta for your lecture. Any questions or comments from this audience? Please go ahead. Please use this microphone. Thank you for your lecture Dr. Morelova. I have a question about the issues that happen when you try to convert a whole plant like for example the exclusion zones, the security issues and even the safety issues for trying to adapt the containment building and maybe rebuild this containment building. Interesting question indeed I think this will be something that once this is really done and this is really finalized then they will release what were the challenges as this is very early in the stages so of course no companies would say with challenges they are facing and why it would not work since they are promoting why it will work at this point but it may be that they will really decide to build it very close of these issues as you say and then just use really the workforce and the grid and the roads but actually sort of really build it just next to the power plant so they can then use the knowledge that we have and all the safety considerations that we have when building new power plants but that is really something that I also think would be coming more to light as this concept will develop more and more. Any other questions? Please. Hello, Roman Glushnikov, Ukraine I have one important question about the best technologies that we can choose for such replacement what do we think do we need to consider especially some special technology for this or it have to be dependent we have to choose it we have to analyze current system from different countries and choose the technology taking into account this current current system or we need to have just some special one So for the technology it would depend on many aspects it would depend of course for the maturity of the technology in each country when I have discussed this with the Indian speaker and they already have a fast reactor program I said why not use a fast reactor if you would decide to repurpose then they said the speaker said well because this would require much more investment in this technology and we already have a lot of maturity in what to call the reactor so we would probably if adopting go this way but then we can consider whether they would like to couple this hydrogen production resalination do they need high temperature do they want to then go that direction rather because it would be economically better or for that purpose better so as you can see in the USA have opted now for for this first sodium called a fast reactor whereas the other company was opting for the water cooled reactor in Romania this SMR so probably it will really be country dependent maybe money also play probably money will play a role and also the purpose and which country is willing to let's say take maybe more risk adopting newer technologies with the idea that they might get some reward out of it because they can have they can have other benefits from this high temperature other production so this is my opinion on this currently okay thank you thank you again Nicoleta now I suggest that we move on to another lecture it will be