Preface

**Section 4 Environmental Aspects of Power Plants 121**

Boško Josimović and Saša Milijić

Alvin G. Stern

**VI** Contents

Chapter 7 **Spatial Aspects of Environmental Impact of Power Plants 123**

**Section 5 Renewable Power and Hydrogen Storage Possibilities 143**

Chapter 8 **Scalable, Self‐Contained Sodium Metal Production Plant for a**

**Hydrogen Fuel Clean Energy Cycle 145**

Global processes of liberalization and deregulation of energy sector have established new technical and technological requirements to the research and development centers all over the world. Imperative requirements include increase of energy efficiency, reliability, and availability of energy resources. Requirements of the modern energy market are integrations of several scientific disciplines and technologies. This book tends to give some aspects of recent improvements of power plant management and technology, covering several ap‐ proaches taken from different technologies and disciplines. It starts from maintenance and reliability improvement of thermal power plants, through safety as a must for nuclear pow‐ er plants, to the environmental impact of various power plants independently on their size and the type of fuel used including renewables. At the end, it is shown how renewable sour‐ ces could be used in production plant for clean energy fuel.

The book is organized in the following sections. After introduction, the first section covers plant management, maintenance, and reliability—three main requirements for modern and efficient power-producing plants. All three chapters in this section are devoted to thermal power plants, still dominant in most power systems in the world. The first chapter in this section underlines the importance of the key performance indicator (KPI) computation for power plant management in order to continuously monitor and improve the business and technological processes. Today, companies especially from energy sector prove that they have reduced maintenance costs by 30% by moving from the concept of corrective mainte‐ nance to the predictive maintenance. Innovative predictive maintenance technique is descri‐ bed in the second chapter of this section. The proposed technique is tested on a specific problem that occurs when time-based maintenance is applied on grinding tables of the coal mill leading to the great material losses because of frequent shutdowns of the entire coal grinding subsystem, as well as the possibility that the failure occurs before replacement. Re‐ sults of this technique could further yield to establishment of optimal maintenance policy in thermoelectric power plant. Reliability is one of the most important requirements of today's power plants. For complex systems, such as steam power plants, it is required to translate system reliability requirements into detailed specifications for all components that constitute the system. In order to develop a model for estimating the reliability index and evaluating the availability index for a coal-fired generating power station, in the last chapter of this sec‐ tion, the graph theoretical analysis and a graph's characteristic polynomial are presented and illustrated by examples. The second section talks about nuclear power plants (NPP), where safety and improvement of technology are up-to-day topic in the field. The last acci‐ dents of the NPP in Chernobyl and Fukushima, besides the reason that caused the accident, raise attention of the researches to verify the safety level of the NPP structures. Further im‐ provements in thorium/uranium fuel usage in high-temperature gas-cooled reactors are ex‐ plained in the next chapter in this section, where, as a result of the rapid development of nuclear energy, thorium has been analyzed because of its abundant reserves and excellent physical properties.

Environmental aspects of power plants are deeply analyzed in the third section. The chapter focuses on the consideration of aspects of environmental impact of all kinds of power plants, without taking into account the details regarding other aspects of energy sector develop‐ ment. This chapter examines the multi-criteria evaluation (MCE) method for carrying out a strategic environmental assessment (SEA) for power plants, covering the analysis and as‐ sessment of the energy sector spatial impacts on the environment and both social and eco‐ nomic elements of sustainable development. The last section deals with the modern world requirements for sustainable means of producing clean energy economically, on a very large scale. This chapter presents a detailed design study of a novel, scalable, self-contained solarpowered electrolytic sodium (Na) metal production plant meant to enable a hydrogen (H2) fuel, sustainable, closed clean energy cycle. Presented analysis shows that power from re‐ newable source (solar plant) is technically and economically viable for meeting the hydro‐ gen fuel clean energy needs of the large number of motor vehicles in the USA.

We expect that readers from various fields of engineering could find interesting practical solutions for improving power plant's management. This book is useful as a reference espe‐ cially for industrial engineers involved in plant's maintenance, graduate students in ad‐ vanced study, and the researches who are working on new technologies toward improvement of power plants' reliability, safety, and overall energy efficiency.

> **Dr Aleksandar B. Nikolic** Associate Research Professor Electrical Engineering Institute Nikola Tesla, Belgrade University of Belgrade, Serbia

> **Dr Zarko S. Janda** Associate Research Professor Electrical Engineering Institute Nikola Tesla, Belgrade University of Belgrade, Serbia

**Section 1**
