Modeling and optimization of different architectures for the tertiary cooling circuit of nuclear power plants to reduce water consumption and thermal impact

Nuclear Power Plants just like any power plant involving the use of a Rankine cycle to produce Power require a cold source to function, often being water from the environment of the plant. Recently and in light of the increasing awareness and concern for climate change, the impact of nuclear power plants on these water resources from environment has been increasingly put into question, particularly in the case of once-through cooling with river water. Consequently, the preliminary design of a nuclear power plant should delve more closely in the sizing of the cold source as well. To that end, this master thesis aims at producing a model fit for the sizing of a cooling tower of future nuclear facilities that accounts for environmental specificities of each considered site. After a literature review of the different types of cooling tower sizing models, closer attention will be paid to counter flow natural draft, cooling towers sized using the Poppe model, deemed the most appropriate for sizing a cooling tower in France considering its water situation. As the height and ground surface of those towers is also highly dependent on the natural draft conditions, the draft equations were also taken into account to give an accurate guess of the needed footprint of the future cooling tower on site. The model developed in python aims to be an acausal one meaning, coded in such a way that the user can choose for each run which variables to be dependent and independent at will. This should prove very useful for a sizing model as constraints can differ from site to site, being for example tower height in one place and tower footprint in another. Finally, we shall validate our python model against real plants data to make sure it can be reliably applied for the sizing of future cooling towers.