'Hybrid' nuclear power plants

(MIT, November 04, 2013)

A new study from MIT comes up with an ambitious idea: marrying a nuclear power plant with another energy system. The paper outlines three concepts, which involve pairing a nuclear plant with an artificial geothermal storage system, a hydrogen production plant, or a shale-oil recovery operation. The last of these ideas would locate a nuclear plant near a deposit of oil shale. That might sound like a “dirty” solution, enabling the use of more carbon-emitting fuel. But author Charles Forsberg suggests that it’s quite the opposite: Instead of burning fossil fuels to heat up the rocks for gaining the crude oil from these deposits, the nuclear power plant’s steam output can be coupled to the shale oil-wells and thus reduce the release of greenhouse gas.