Evaluating thermal-hydraulic energy conversion of water-cooled small modular reactors: Supporting design changes and customer needs

This study evaluates component-to-system level thermal power cycle of small modular reactor (SMR) systems, focusing on design flexibility driven by customer needs and strategies to improve efficiency through simplified configurations. Advanced SMRs offer benefits such as enhanced safety, multipurpose applications (e.g., cogeneration), factory manufacturing, and scalability. However, evolving SMR designs, influenced by variations in size, fuel, and coolants, necessitate updates to power cycles tailored for applications such as utilities, industrial heat, data centers, and cogeneration under diverse site conditions (e.g., availability of cooling water). A vendor-neutral SMR power cycle study is conducted, incorporating example validation cases: (a) a component-level steam generator models and (b) a system-level SMR plant, to develop efficient and flexible system configurations addressing both nuclear and non-nuclear applications, reduce design iterations and uncertanities.