Supercritical Water-Cooled Reactors

Supercritical water-cooled reactor (SCWR) is the watercooled 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]. The advantages of the SCWRs are shown as follows [1].