The increase penetration of variable renewable electricity suppliers in the grid is leading to an increase volatility of the electric net demand (electricity demand minus variable renewable supply). The additional volatility increases the cost of covering net demand and decreases the amount of load that can be classified as base-load. The reduction of the base-load challenges the economics of capital intense suppliers among which nuclear. A possible solution would be the introduction of additional variable load capable to absorb volatility. In particular, if this is done using a direct coupling (steam) between the variable load and the nuclear plant, the benefit could be increased by a better thermal efficiency of the process.
The presentation will focus on the analytical and software framework under construction to perform the needed economic assessments. Early results will be presented and discussed.
Dr. Cristian Rabiti is currently the Nuclear Engineering Method Development Department Manager at the Idaho National Laboratory. His areas of expertise are in neutron transport, reactor physics, uncertainty quantification, risk analysis and financial modelling.
Dr. Cristian Rabiti is currently leading the financial modelling of nuclear hybrid energy systems. His particular interest in this field is economic evaluation of nuclear energy by system cost analysis, in a way to conciliate risk analysis with financial performance.
The passion for analysis of stochastic system started when he was leading the RAVEN software development which is currently used for risk analysis, financial modelling, and uncertainty quantification. Dr. Cristian has become since then a strong proponent of advanced validation methodologies and risk analysis.
Dr. Cristian started his career in the development of computational tools in neutron transport and reactor physic. He worked on time dependent transport within the ERANOS tool-suite (FZK-Germany), later he worked on the method of characteristics for the PROTHEUS code (Argonne National Laboratory), and, when he started his job at the Idaho National Laboratory he led the development of the reactor physics core simulator PHISICS (Idaho National Laboratory).
Dr Cristian Rabiti has a PhD in mechanical engineering for the university of Stuttgart (2006) and an MBA from IE Business school (Madrid 2010, Spain)
