Desalination of seawater using nuclear heat

The Nuclear Desalination Demonstration Project (NDDP), Kalpakkam, envisages setting up a 6300 m3/d capacity hybrid MSF-RO plant based on an indigenous design. The plant will meet the process water requirements of MAPS and will augment the drinking water sources of the nearby complex. This paper describes the basic process flow sheet of the SWRO plant, part of the hybrid MSF-RO desalination plant. The SWRO plant consists of a pretreatment system, high-pressure pumping system with energy recovery turbine, RO modules and membrane cleaning system. The product water from the SWRO plant with a TDS of about 400 ppm will be mixed with product water of the MSF plant containing 10 ppm TDS. The projection of the permeate output and TDS for a few SWRO commercial modules at different seawater temperatures were carried out to select the optimum conditions of the SWRO plant. The role of energy recovery from RO reject stream is also investigated. As the seawater TDS at our site is around 35,000 ppm, it was proposed to study the feasibility of using reject stream from the RO plant as feed for the MSF plant in future.