Appropriate thermodynamic cycles to be used in future pressure-channel supercritical water-cooled nuclear power plants

As member of the Generation IV International Forum (GIF), Canada has decided to orient its efforts towards the design of a CANDU-type SuperCritical Water-cooled nuclear Reactor (SCWR). Such a system must run at a coolant outlet temperature of about 625 °C and at a pressure of 25 MPa. Even though several steam-cycle arrangements used in existing thermal-power plants have been discussed by many authors, none of the proposed cycles have been optimized and adapted to the pressure-channel SCWR concept. The present work is intended to fulfil this gap by including at least two alternative solutions of SCWR power cycles that could reheat the supercritical water in the reactor core to achieve a net mechanical power of 1200-MW. Thus, thermodynamic models for preselected power cycles, their validation among existing data as well as their optimization using an “evolutionary optimization” technique based on genetic algorithms are presented and discussed.