Thermal and stability considerations for a supercritical water-cooled fast reactor with downward-flow channels during power-raising phase of plant startup

This paper describes study on the procedure of raising the reactor thermal power and the reactor coolant flow rate during the power-raising phase of plant startup for the supercritical water-cooled fast reactor (SWFR), which is selected as one of the Generation IV reactor concepts. Since part of the seed fuel assemblies and all the blanket fuel assemblies of the SWFR are cooled by downward flow, the feedwater from the reactor vessel inlet nozzle to the mixing plenum located below the core is distributed among these fuel assemblies and the downcomer. The flow rate distribution as the function of both the reactor thermal power and the feedwater flow rate, which are the design parameters for the power-raising phase, is obtained by the thermal hydraulic calculations. Based on the flow rate distribution, thermal analyses and thermal–hydraulic stability analyses are carried out in order to obtain the available region of the reactor thermal power and the feedwater flow rate for the power-raising phase. The criteria for the “available” region are the maximum cladding surface temperature (MCST) and the decay ratio of thermal–hydraulic stability in three “hot” channels; two seed assemblies with upward/downward flow and a blanket assembly. The effects of various heat transfer correlations and axial power distributions are also studied.