Russia’s Policy Transition to a Hydrogen Economy and the Implications of South Korea–Russia Cooperation

Leading countries are developing clean energy to replace fossil fuels. In this context, Russia is changing its energy policy towards fostering new energy resources, such as hydrogen and helium. Hydrogen will not only contribute to Russia’s financial revenue by replacing natural gas, but will also provide a basis for it to maintain its dominance over the international energy market by pioneering new energy markets. Russia is aiming to produce more than two million tons of hydrogen fuel for export to Europe and Asia by 2035. However, it is facing many challenges, including developing hydrogen fuel storage systems, acquiring the technology required for exporting hydrogen, and building trust in the fuel market. Meanwhile, South Korea has a foundation for developing a hydrogen industry, as it has the highest capacity in the world to produce fuel cells and the ability to manufacture LNG: (liquefied natural gas) carriers. Therefore, South Korea and Russia have sufficient potential to create a new complementary and reciprocal cooperation model in the hydrogen fuel field. This study examines the present and future of Russia’s energy policy in this area as well as discusses South Korea and Russia’s cooperation plans in the hydrogen fuel sector and the related implications.

Methodology for Determining the Thermal and Thermal-Stress States of a Concrete Storage Container for Spent Nuclear Fuel for Assessment of Its Service Life

The work is devoted to the development of methodologies for determining the thermal and thermal-stress states of the main equipment in dry container storage facilities for spent nuclear fuel. Storage facilities of this type are most common for spent fuel of nuclear power reactors. The safety of storage equipment in terms of assessing its service life is not covered widely enough in the world scientific literature. In particular, there are no effective methods for calculating the thermal and thermal-stress states of the equipment that would take into account the influence of many external factors throughout the life of a storage facility. To assess the thermal state of the containers, forward conjugate heat transfer problems, accounting for the mutual heat transfer in both a solid body and in the fluid environment (air), are proposed to be solved. Based on the solution of the conjugate heat transfer problems, the boundary conditions are to be determined to further assess the thermal-stress state of storage containers using inverse heat transfer problems. The proposed approach to determining the thermal and thermal-stress states of a concrete spent fuel container will promote more effective methods for assessing the service life of dry spent fuel storage facilities, which is, in turn, necessary in the development of ageing management programs for storage equipment and long-term safe operation.

Kajian pembentukan peraturan mengenai sistem pendingin reaktor dan sistem terkait untuk reaktor berpendingin gas

IN 2021, BAPETEN, AS THE REGULATORY BODY, IS ESTABLISHING A BAPETEN REGULATION REGARDING THE REACTOR COOLANT SYSTEM AND RELATED SYSTEMS, WHICH CURRENTLY ARE NOT YET AVAILABLE. Therefore, it is crucial to establish the BAPETEN Regulation. Based on the reasons, before setting the BAPETEN Regulation, it is necessary to conduct a study that is expected to provide a more comprehensive description and provide recommendations on what things need to be regulated in the BAPETEN Regulation, especially for gas-cooled reactors. The method used in this study is a literature study from various relevant references. The result of this study is that it is essential to require a capacity of the ultimate heat sink, including the spent nuclear fuel storage pool and a minimum period of the ability of the top heat sink in the accident analysis if the decay heat in the storage pool and the residual heat in the reactor core fail simultaneously. On the other hand, it is also necessary to require a margin of uncertainty to evaluate a situation and take corrective action. Likewise, independent and redundant access to the ultimate heat sink is needed to increase reliability. As for gas-cooled reactors, it is required to adapt the terms used. In addition, it is necessary to determine the appropriate definition because some of the terms used in water-cooled reactors have the same terms as gas-cooled reactors but have different functions. Keywords: Regulatory assessment, coolant system, related systems, gas-cooled reactors

Economic Evaluation of an Ammonia-Fueled Ammonia Carrier Depending on Methods of Ammonia Fuel Storage

This study proposed two concepts for ammonia fuel storage for an ammonia-fueled ammonia carrier and evaluated these concepts in terms of economics. The first concept was to use ammonia in the cargo tank as fuel and the second concept was to install an additional independent fuel tank in the vessel. When more fuel tanks were installed, there was no cargo loss. However, there were extra costs for fuel tanks. The target ship was an 84,000 m3 ammonia carrier (very large gas carrier, VLGC). It traveled from Kuwait to South Korea. The capacity of fuel tanks was 4170 m3, which is the required amount for the round trip. This study conducted an economic evaluation to compare the two proposed concepts. Profits were estimated based on sales and life cycle cost (LCC). Results showed that sales were USD 1223 million for the first concept and USD 1287 million for the second concept. Profits for the first and second concepts were USD 684.3 million and USD 739.5 million, respectively. The second concept showed a USD 53.1 million higher profit than the first concept. This means that the second concept, which installed additional independent fuel tanks was better than the first concept in terms of economics. Sensitivity analysis was performed to investigate the influence of given parameters on the results. When the ammonia fuel price was changed by ±25%, there was a 15% change in the profits and if the ammonia (transport) fee was changed by ±25%, there was a 45% change in the profits. The ammonia fuel price and ammonia (cargo) transport fee had a substantial influence on the business of ammonia carriers.

Влияние гранулометрического состава песка на глубину проникновения дизельного топлива

Deployment of tanks for temporary storage of fuel on sand layer (a sand blanket) is an effective method to protect the soil from process-related spills. Asessment of the required thickness of the sand layer is important in practice, as it determines the layer’s protective properties when oil droplets fall on the surface. This paper investigates the dependences of the speed and depth of ingress of DT-Z-K5 diesel fuel on the grain size composition of the sand used as a protective layer. Substantiation has been given for the approach to the evaluation of the kinetics and to the depth of ingress of petroleum products into the sand, such approach being based upon the probabilistic movement of the fluid flow boundaries in the protective layer. It is proposed to describe the ingress of fuel into the sand layer in the coordinate system of the square root of the process time. Based on the results of the study, there have been established the dependences of the speed and depth of ingress of DT-Z-K5 fuel into the protective layer on the sand grain size and on the quantity of petroleum product leaked on the surface. It has been established that to create a protective layer preventing the ingress of fuel into the soil in the event of process-related leaks in temporary fuel storage tanks, it is optimal to use sand with 0.8 mm grain. Размещение резервуаров для временного хранения горючего на слое песка (песчаной подушке) является эффективным способом защиты грунта от технологических проливов. Практическое значение имеет оценка необходимой толщины песчаного слоя, которая определяет его защитные свойства при попадании на поверхность капель нефтепродукта. В настоящей работе исследованы зависимости скорости и глубины проникновения дизельного топлива ДТ-З-К5 от гранулометрического состава частиц песка, используемого в качестве защитного слоя. Обоснован подход к оценке кинетики и глубины проникновения нефтепродукта в песок, основу которого составляет вероятностное движение границ потока жидкости в защитном слое. Предложено описывать проникновение топлива в слой песка в системе координат корня квадратного из времени процесса. По результатам исследования установлены зависимости скорости и глубины проникновения ДТ-З-К5 в защитный слой от размера частиц песка и количества вносимого на поверхность нефтепродукта. Определено, что для создания защитного слоя, исключающего проникновение топлива в почву при возникновении технологических протечек резервуаров временного хранения горючего, оптимально использовать песок с размером частиц от 0,8 мм. Предложенный подход по получению зависимостей глубины проникновения топлива от условного времени можно использовать для оценки распределения топлива в слоях песка с различными размерами частиц.

POET (v0.1): speedup of many-core parallel reactive transport simulations with fast DHT lookups

Coupled reactive transport simulations are extremely demanding in terms of required computational power, which hampers their application and leads to coarsened and oversimplified domains. The chemical sub-process represents the major bottleneck: its acceleration is an urgent challenge which gathers increasing interdisciplinary interest along with pressing requirements for subsurface utilization such as spent nuclear fuel storage, geothermal energy and CO2 storage. In this context we developed POET (POtsdam rEactive Transport), a research parallel reactive transport simulator integrating algorithmic improvements which decisively speed up coupled simulations. In particular, POET is designed with a master/worker architecture, which ensures computational efficiency in both multicore and cluster compute environments. POET does not rely on contiguous grid partitions for the parallelization of chemistry but forms work packages composed of grid cells distant from each other. Such scattering prevents particularly expensive geochemical simulations, usually concentrated in the vicinity of a reactive front, from generating load imbalance between the available CPUs (central processing units), as is often the case with classical partitions. Furthermore, POET leverages an original implementation of the distributed hash table (DHT) mechanism to cache the results of geochemical simulations for further reuse in subsequent time steps during the coupled simulation. The caching is hence particularly advantageous for initially chemically homogeneous simulations and for smooth reaction fronts. We tune the rounding employed in the DHT on a 2D benchmark to validate the caching approach, and we evaluate the performance gain of POET's master/worker architecture and the DHT speedup on a 3D benchmark comprising around 650 000 grid elements. The runtime for 200 coupling iterations, corresponding to 960 simulation days, reduced from about 24 h on 11 workers to 29 min on 719 workers. Activating the DHT reduces the runtime further to 2 h and 8 min respectively. Only with these kinds of reduced hardware requirements and computational costs is it possible to realistically perform the long-term complex reactive transport simulations, as well as perform the uncertainty analyses required by pressing societal challenges connected with subsurface utilization.