Assessing future water stress scenarios over six nuclear power plant locations of India through downscaled CMIP5 models
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ORIGINAL PAPER
Assessing future water stress scenarios over six nuclear power plant locations of India through downscaled CMIP5 models Javed Akhter 1 & Lalu Das 2 & Argha Deb 1 Received: 2 December 2019 / Accepted: 21 May 2020 # Springer-Verlag GmbH Austria, part of Springer Nature 2020
Abstract The present study has assessed the possible water stress scenarios over six nuclear power plant locations (inland plants at Kakrapar, Kota, and Narora and coastal plants at Kodankulam, Kalpakkam, and Tarapur) of India based on downscaled climatic products from 12 coupled model inter-comparison project 5 (CMIP5) simulations. Firstly, statistically downscaled scenarios over power plant locations for water temperature, precipitation, evapotranspiration, and sea surface temperature (SST) have been developed using various statistical downscaling methods. Secondly, the water stress has been quantified by formulating a multivariate standardized water stress index (MSWSI) based on water temperature and freshwater availability (precipitation minus evapotranspiration) over inland plants and a univariate index from the SST for coastal plants. Results have indicated that three inland power plants are not expecting any scarcity of freshwater availability. However, they have been projected to face high to severe water stress from middle to end of the century due to a higher warming rate of water temperature under global warming conditions. Similarly, three coastal plants have also been projected to prevail high to severe water stress through enhanced SST warming. Therefore, the efficiency and productivity of the nuclear plants may reduce under changing climatic conditions.
1 Introduction Nuclear power plants (NPPs) have been given immense importance to mitigate global warming due to its low carbon emission technology (IAEA 2016). Hence, the demand for nuclear energy has been on the rise across the globe in recent times. At present, 11% of the world’s electricity supply has been provided by nuclear energy. Worldwide 448 reactors in 31 various countries are operating with 391.744 GW total net electric capacities (Akhter et al. 2018a). However, similar to other thermoelectric plants, NPPs are highly vulnerable to the impacts of climate change. NPPs can be adversely affected by the increase in ambient temperature, heat waves, sea-level rise, storm surges, and heavy rainfall events (Akhter et al. 2018a). On the other hand, water stress can cause severe problems in the supply of coolant waters for
* Lalu Das [email protected] 1
Department of Physics, Jadavpur University, Kolkata 700032, India
2
Department of Agricultural Meteorology and Physics, Bidhan Chandra Krishi Viswavidyalaya, Mohanpur, WB 741252, India
NPPs. Nuclear plants draw substantially more water to cool or condense the coolant than other thermoelectric plants. For example, a nuclear plant may require 2 billion cubic meters of water each year for cooling purposes (Vrontisi 2013). The temperature of coolant water impacts the efficiency of the plant by influencing the temp
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