Analysis of Turbine Pressure, Feed Water Temperature and Condenser Back Pressure on Performance of Power Generation System for Lead-Based Reactor

The nuclear power plants are playing an important role to mitigate the energy demands and to safe environment from Carbon-dioxide (CO2) emissions. Lead-based reactors have high core outlet temperature and have the potential to achieve high performance of power generation system. In this paper, a reference scheme with two reheater has been chosen for lead-based reactor with 400 MWth. The influence of turbine pressure, feed water temperature and condenser back pressure have been analyzed to improve the performance of lead-based power reactor. The research results show that as turbine pressure is increased from 18 MPa to 22 MPa at steam inlet temperature of 465 oC, the thermal efficiency of system is increased from 44.30% to 46.35%. As soon as the system is operated at 22 MPa and the temperature of the feed water is increased from 335 oC to 356 oC, the thermal efficiency of system can be increased up to 49.45% and it decreased with the increase of condenser back pressure from 0.004 MPa to 0.015 MPa. The maximum thermal efficiency of the system was 45.28% at 0.004 MPa condenser back pressure. The CO2 emissions to environment can be controlled by increasing the performance of the lead-based power reactor. The This work can be used for the analysis and optimization of a power plant based on heavy metal cooled reactor concept