TP24-05 Investigation of Water Technology Recovery System for Natural Draft Cooling Towers – Experimentation on Mistrial Test Facility

In a context of climate change, energy transition policy and projected new buildings of nuclear plants, EDF, as a major Utility, is driven to consider for its electricity production plants, the most efficient technological solutions in terms of energetic and environmental performance. In this context, the main production heat sink technology, using water drawn from the environment, plays a major role. Its operation has a direct impact on the electric energy production, and the type of technology used implies significant quantities of water withdrawal or consumption. In order to explore all possible means of reducing water consumption, EDF is willing to test innovative solutions for optimizing the use of water taken from the environment. One of the solutions currently being explored involves testing the applicability of the process developed by Infinite Cooling to recover over saturated vapor inside natural draft cooling towers. To this end, an experimental program is planned on MISTRAL test facility. EDF MISTRAL test facility is usually dedicated to the verification of thermal performance of cooling tower materials (fills, sprayers) before retrofit. In 2022, France officially embarked on a program to revive nuclear power, with the aim of extending the lifespan of existing plants and building several new reactors (EPR2). In this new context, MISTRAL facility has been rehabilitated to qualify fills to be used in existing and future EPR2 cooling towers.The presentation will outline the main objectives pursued by EDF through these tests aimed at characterizing water capture technology. Particularly, a preliminary assessment of water recovery potential has been made using saturated and over saturated air flow calculated with Poppe modeling approach. Then, after a general presentation of the MISTRAL test facility, fully instrumented for cooling fills performance qualification, we will show how we plan to implement the water collection system and the test procedure in order to stay as representative as possible to the real conditions encountered in natural draft air coolers.