Repurpose Diablo Canyon for Economical Water & Energy? 🗓

Sponsored by  MIT Club of Northern California cosponsored by IEEE SCV PES/IAS,  LMAG SCV
Please join us on March 16, 2022, for a virtual fireside chat:
“Can California Repurpose Diablo Canyon to provide both Giga-scale Drinking Water and Clean Energy?”
Slides: April 22, 2021     On-demand video: (1:34:11)

Dr. Jacopo Buongiorno, Professor of Nuclear Science and Engineering at MIT
Dr. John H. Lienhard, Professor Water and Food Systems at MIT
Dr. John Parsons, Senior Lecturer at MIT Sloan School of Management

Description:

California is in the midst of the second multiyear drought in 8 years, with drinking water conservation calls ranging from 10% to 32% across the State.  California’s water supply depends on winter precipitation that is the most variable in the nation.  Further, the State’s continuing investment in water supply, storage and conveyance comes at significant cost to the ecosystem, with frequent tradeoffs and delays to address environmental concerns.

Thus, there is great interest in wholly new water sources such as recycled water and desalination; however, these are typically expensive as well as capital & energy intensive.   What if California could build a billion gallon per day desalination plant?

MIT faculty members John Lienhard, Jacopo Buongiorno, and John Parsons, working with the Stanford Precourt Energy Institute, have developed an innovative proposal to generate significant quantities of desalinated water as well as zero carbon electricity and green transportation fuel.  By repurposing the existing Diablo Canyon Nuclear facility, they found that the nuclear plant plus a new giga-scale desalination plant could simultaneously help to stabilize the State’s electric grid with carbon-free electricity and provide desalinated water to supplement the State’s chronic water shortages at a scale potentially comparable to the largest reservoir projects.

The proposal consists of three parts:

• Build a large scale modular desalinated water facility, using existing RO technology, adjacent to Diablo Canyon that shares its large-scale water facilities and capitalizes on low-cost electricity from the nuclear plant,
• Continue to use Diablo Canyon to provide dispatchable carbon-free power to the grid to complement the State’s large renewable electric supply, while simultaneously addressing environmental concerns regarding seawater intake and heat discharge,
• Build a hydrogen fuel manufacturing facility adjacent to Diablo Canyon to generate green hydrogen fuel to further decarbonize the transportation industry in the State.

The professors will discuss the technical and economic feasibility of this design, how it can reduce carbon emissions vs. the current trajectory for how we balance renewable energy, and how it can provide new, economical drought-proof water to the State on a scale not considered possible heretofore.

About the Speakers:

Jacopo Buongiorno is the TEPCO Professor of Nuclear Science and Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and the Director of Science and Technology of the MIT Nuclear Reactor Laboratory. He teaches a variety of undergraduate and graduate courses in thermo-fluids engineering and nuclear reactor engineering.

Jacopo has published 90 journal articles in the areas of reactor safety and design, two-phase flow and heat transfer, and nanofluid technology.  For his research work and his teaching at MIT he won several awards, among which the ANS Outstanding Teacher Award (2019), the MIT MacVicar Faculty Fellowship (2014), the ANS Landis Young Member Engineering Achievement Award (2011), the ASME Heat Transfer Best Paper Award (2008), and the ANS Mark Mills Award (2001).

Jacopo is the Director of the Center for Advanced Nuclear Energy Systems (CANES). In 2016-2018 he led the MIT study on the Future of Nuclear Energy in a Carbon-Constrained World.  Jacopo is a consultant for the nuclear industry in the area of reactor thermal-hydraulics, and a member of the Accrediting Board of the National Academy of Nuclear Training. He is also a member of the Secretary of Energy Advisory Board (SEAB) Space Working Group, a Fellow of the American Nuclear Society (including service on its Special Committee on Fukushima in 2011-2012), a member of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers, past member of the Naval Studies Board (2017-2019), and a participant in the Defense Science Study Group (2014-2015).

He earned a BS in Nuclear Engineering at Polytechnic of Milan in 1996 and his PhD in Nuclear Engineering at MIT in 2000.

John H. Lienhard V is the Abdul Latif Jameel Professor and the founding Director of the Abdul Latif Jameel Water and Food Systems Lab at MIT (J-WAFS). During thirty-five years on the MIT faculty, Lienhard’s research and educational efforts have focused on heat and mass transfer, water purification and desalination, and thermodynamics. As Director of J-WAFS, he coordinates MIT’s research in food security and water supply for a growing population on a changing planet.

Lienhard received his bachelor’s and master’s degrees in thermal engineering at UCLA and his PhD in environmental fluid dynamics at UC San Diego. His research on water purification has included humidification-dehumidification desalination, membrane distillation, forward and reverse osmosis, nanofiltration, electrodialysis, solar-driven desalination, solvent extraction, bubble columns, management of high salinity brines, and energy efficiency analysis of desalination cycles. He has directly supervised 100 graduate theses and postdoctoral associates and is author of more than 300 peer-reviewed publications. He has been issued 38 US patents, and he is a co-founder of the international water treatment company, Gradiant Corporation.

Lienhard is a Fellow of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME), a Fellow of the American Society of Thermal and Fluid Engineers (ASTFE), and a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). He is a recipient of the 1988 National Science Foundation Presidential Young Investigator Award, the 1992 SAE Teetor Award, the 2012 ASME Technical Communities Globalization Medal, and the 2015 ASME Heat Transfer Memorial Award, and the 2019 ASME Edward F. Obert Award. Lienhard is the author of textbooks on heat transfer, on measurement and instrumentation, and on thermal modeling, and he is a registered professional engineer in Massachusetts and Vermont.

John Parsons

Dr. Parsons is a Senior Lecturer at the Sloan School of Management.  His research focuses on the valuation and financing of investments in energy markets, as well as the problems of risk in energy and environment markets.

He is currently an Associate Director at MIT’s Center for Energy and Environmental Policy Research (CEEPR). He was a co-Director of the recent MIT study on the Future of Nuclear Energy in a Carbon Constrained World.  Dr. Parsons serves as an Associate Member of the U.S. CFTC’s Energy and Environmental Markets Advisory Committee and has been a Visiting Scholar at the U.S. Federal Energy Regulatory Commission.

He holds a BA in Economics from Princeton University and a PhD in Economics from Northwestern University.

Moderator

Steve Jordan

Steve Jordan serves as an elected Board member and President of Purissima Hills Water District (PHWD), and as a board member of the Bay Area Water Conservation and Supply Agency.  He also serves as Chairman of the IEEE Power and Energy Society chapter in Santa Clara Valley.  He has led PHWD’s adoption of Advanced Metering Infrastructure (AMI) and several conservation initiatives over the last 5 years, which have resulted in a 30% reduction in water consumption.

Previously he led WaterCity, Inc. which installed on site water recycling systems.  He was VP of Engineering at Poqet Computer where he led the design and introduction of the first DOS-compatible handheld PC. He previously served in management roles at Fairchild Semiconductor Co., Daisy Systems and Mostek, an early semiconductor memory innovator.

He has consulted to technology businesses for over 25 years, with a focus on developing successful growth strategies for both Fortune 100 companies and venture funded startups. He was a Partner with R. B. Webber and Co., a leading Silicon Valley technology strategy management consulting firm, and previously consulted with McKinsey and Co. in its technology practice.

He earned a BS in Electrical Engineering and a BS in Economics at MIT and an MBA at Harvard Business School.

Steve Jordan