NSE team wins ANS Student Design Competition
The decarbonization of the economy over the next few decades requires the massive deployment of clean energy sources. While nuclear power is a low-carbon, dispatchable, and sustainable source of electricity generation, the size and complexity of large traditional reactors hinder the rapid deployment of this technology. Engineers need to devise more innovative ways to make nuclear reactors safer, faster to deploy, and economically competitive with fossil fuel alternatives.
A team of graduate students — Assil Halimi, Gyutae Park, Isabel Naranjo De Candido, and Loukas Carayannopoulos — designed a possible solution: a reactor with a much smaller power output (~25MWth) also known as a microreactor. To improve its performance compared to other microreactors in the market, they use an organic coolant and light water moderator to improve its efficiency and make it more compact, hence, improving its economic performance. Additionally, it integrates electrolyzers with the plant turbomachinery to generate clean hydrogen to further enhance the decarbonization potential of their technology. Hydrogen can be used to substitute fossil fuel in cases that are difficult to electrify such as high temperature applications and heavy transportation.
The team’s project, titled “Design Optimization of an Organic-Cooled Light-Water-Moderated Micro-Reactor for Electricity and Hydrogen Generation”, used a multi-objective optimization framework that they developed as part of the Multidisciplinary Design Optimization (16.888) class in fall 2023.
They were awarded the prize for a graduate project in the Student Design Competition hosted by the Education, Training, and Workforce Development Division of the American Nuclear Society.
January 2024
Department of Nuclear Science & Engineering
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
77 Massachusetts Avenue, 24-107 (map)
Cambridge, MA 02139
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