Introducing energy efficiency in nuclear power plants by using variable medium voltage frequency drives

The presented paper deals with an assessment study regarding the implementation of the energy efficiency concept in Nuclear Power Plants. This concept is mainly related to Directive 27/2012 of the European Parliament and the Council regarding the 20% set percent reduction in total energy consumption. For achieving this objective the authors propose a new control method for the nuclear unit's medium voltage large pumps, using state-of-art variable frequency drives. In order to prove the effectiveness of this method specific computational simulation software is performed, using CANDU reactor specific data. The main benefits using this approach are the increase reliability of the power production process and the significant decrease in overall plant internal services energy consumption, up to 12.4%. This percent can contribute to energy efficiency set percent with a total share of 15 MWh of 7600 MW which represents the current Romanian energy production capacity.