Development of Reduced-Moderation Water Reactor (RMWR) for sustainable energy supply

Iwamura, Takamichi; Okubo, Tsutomu; Kureta, Masatoshi; Nakatsuka, Toru; Takeda, Renzo*; Yamamoto, Kazuhiko*

Proceedings of 13th Pacific Basin Nuclear Conference (PBNC 2002) (CD-ROM), 7 Pages, 2002/10

In order to ensure sustainable energy supply in Japan, the reduced-moderation water reactor (RMWR) has been developed by JAERI since 1998. MOX fuel assemblies with tight lattice arrangement are used to increase the conversion ratio. In order to establish negative void reactivity coefficient, the core should be short and flat to increase neutron leakage from the core. The core designs were accomplished to a large core with 1,356MWe and a small core with 330MWe. For both cores, negative void coefficient and natural circulation cooling of the core were realized. To confirm thermal-hydraulic feasibility, critical heat flux experiments were performed using 7-rod bundles with the gap width of 1mm and 1.3mm. The results indicated that enough cooling was assured for the tight lattice core. Further R&D studies, including large scale thermal-hydraulic experiments, reactor physics experiments, development of high burn-up fuel cladding material and simplified reprocessing technology, are necessary to realize commercial introduction of RMWR by 2020's for the replacement of current generation LWRs.