Fuel Assembly Design for Supercritical Water Cooled Reactor

Abstract

The supercritical watercooled reactor (SWCR) has been selected as one of the most promising reactors for Generation IV nuclear reactors due to its higher thermal efficiency and more simplified structure compared to the stateoftheart light water reactors (LWRs). However, there are a large number of potential problems that must be addressed, particularly the fuel assembly design of the SCWR. SCWRs are a kind of hightemperature, highpressure, watercooled reactor that operates above the thermodynamic critical point of water (374آ°C, 22.1آ MPa). Corrosion and degradation of materials used in supercritical water environments are determined by several environmentand materialdependent factors. In particular, irradiationinduced changes in microstructure and microchemistry are major concerns in a nuclear reactor. Many structural materials including alloys and ceramics have been proposed for use as SCWR components or materials for applying protective coatings in SCWRs. In this paper, the present status of supercritical fuel assembly design at home and abroad is reported. According to the special requirements of supercritical core design, a kind of configuration design of fuel assembly with twoflow core and using SiC as cladding material are proposed. The analysis results have shown that the design basically meets the requirements of fuel assembly design, which has good feasibility and performance.