Editorial | Open Access
Jiejin Cai, Claude Renault, Junli Gou, "Supercritical Water-Cooled Reactors", Science and Technology of Nuclear Installations, vol. 2014, Article ID 548672, 2 pages, 2014. https://doi.org/10.1155/2014/548672
Supercritical Water-Cooled Reactors
Supercritical water-cooled reactor (SCWR) is the water-cooled reactor using supercritical pressure water as coolant [1]. It is considered as one of the promising Generation IV reactors, due to its advantages of plant simplification and high thermal efficiency [2, 3].
Several design concepts of SCWRs have been proposed: (a) supercritical water-cooled thermal neutron reactor; (b) supercritical water-cooled fast neutron reactor; (c) supercritical water-cooled mixed neutron spectrum reactor; (d) supercritical water-cooled pebble bed reactor; (e) supercritical heavy-water-cooled reactor. The detailed design parameters of some typical SCWR concepts around the world are summarized in Table 1 [4]. Recently, the use of thorium in the SCWRs has been investigated [5, 6].
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Now the special issue is published, which includes 5 papers. The contents include a new concept of core design, like “A simplified supercritical fast reactor with thorium fuel,” calculation code development, like “Preliminary development of thermal power calculation code H-power for a supercritical water reactor,” “Code development in coupled PARCS/RELAP5 for supercritical water reactor,” and flow distribution, one of the important issues of thermal hydraulics in the nuclear reactor, like “Core flow distribution from coupled supercritical water reactor analysis.” It also contains some experimental results, like “Experimental investigation on flow-induced vibration of fuel rods in supercritical water loop.” We hope that readers of this special issue will find not only the development status of SCWRs and updated reviews on SCWRs, but also the formulation of important questions to be resolved such as how to develop the codes for SCWRs.
Jiejin Cai
Claude Renault
Junli Gou
References
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Copyright
Copyright © 2014 Jiejin Cai et al. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.