Nuclear process heat can be used for difficult recovery and refinery operations.
Access To More Reserves
There are some very important applications for nuclear process heat that require additional development and may be available in the long term. One of the most important examples of this is the exploitation of the indigenous deposits using nuclear process heat. The United States has sufficient oil shale deposits to meet our current oil demands for the next 100 years. Many oil shale deposits are thick (200 to 700 meters) and can yield up to 2.5 million barrels of oil per acre. New methods for low-cost recovery of shale oil are being developed by Shell Oil and others. If successful, recovering shale oil may become the primary form of domestic oil production in several decades. The leading option involves drilling wells into oil shale, using electric heaters to raise the bulk temperature of the oil shale to between 270°C to about 400°C1 to initiate chemical reactions that produce light crude oil, and then pumping the oil to the surface. The primary production cost is the expense of high-temperature electrical heating. Because of the low thermal conductivity of oil shale, a high temperature is required (700°C) at the heater wells to obtain the required temperature in the bulk oil shale.2
A cost-effective alternative is the use of high temperature gas-cooled reactors to provide heat to replace the electricity and avoid the large energy loss in converting to thermal heat that is then used to heat oil shale. The use of direct thermal energy rather than electricity has the potential to significantly reduce the costs of shale oil recovery.