Concept of a pressurized water reactor cooled with supercritical water in the primary loop Original Research Article

A novel concept of a pressurized water reactor with a primary loop cooled with supercritical water is introduced and analyzed in this work. A steam cycle analysis has been performed to illustrate the advantages of such a nuclear power plant with respect to specific power and thermal efficiency. Moreover, a reactor pressure vessel concept including its internals and a suitable core and fuel assembly design are presented overcoming the problems, which arise due to the high heat up of the coolant and the density change involved with it. The core power and coolant density distributions are predicted with coupled neutronic and thermal-hydraulic analyses. The method features the definition of inlet orifices for coolant mass flow adjustment within the core as well as an additional tool for the interpolation of local pin power data. The latter one has been used for a successive sub-channel analysis of the hottest fuel assembly of the core, which provides a more detailed spatial resolution and thus predicts peak cladding temperatures, the maximum linear pin power of fuel pins, and maximum fuel temperatures. It can be shown that maximum temperatures of claddings and fuel are well below the material limits. Thanks to an average core exit temperature below the pseudo-critical temperature, the core concept leaves enough margin for additional uncertainties and allowances for operation.