Potential Use of Ceramic Materials for Supercritical Water-Cooled Reactors

Abstract

The Supercritical Water-Cooled Reactor (SCWR) presents unique materials challenges due to the effects of corrosion compounded by water radiolysis and materials irradiation. This paper focuses on the general corrosion of ceramic materials (in bulk and coating form) in SCW and surveys the experimental work performed in the area of corrosion and stress corrosion cracking (SCC) of ceramic materials for potential use in a pressure tube SCWR. Among the ceramic materials tested, pure alumina and zirconia/magnesia have so far showed excellent corrosion resistance, while mullite, silicon nitride and silicon carbide based materials showed inferior corrosion resistance compared to the alumina. In addition to the survey, some preliminary test results on several ceramic materials and artificially grown surface oxides will be presented in this paper.