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Recently, a group of countries has initiated an international collaboration, the Generation IV International Forum (GIF), to develop the next-generation nuclear reactors. The GIF program has narrowed the design options of nuclear reactors to the following six concepts: 1) SuperCritical-Water-cooled Reactor (SCWR); 2) Sodium-cooled Fast Reactor (SFR); 3) Lead-cooled Fast Reactor (LFR); 4) Molten Salt Reactor (MSR); 5) Gas-cooled Fast Reactor (GFR); and 6) Very-High-Temperature Reactor (VHTR); The purpose of this paper is to compare main thermophysical, corrosion, and neutronic properties of the Generation-IV reactors’ coolants within the proposed range of operation.

Gearboxes used on mining machinery work under conditions of exceptional changes in working loads. Given the not negligible investment in purchasing the gearboxes and maintenance costs due to the failure of his elements, it is very important that they have a satisfactory service life. Based on their technical characteristics, a model will be created using the PROMETHEE method with the aim of ranking each of the offered alternatives. Model verification will be performed on the basis of hours worked in the practical application of the reducers analyzed.

Nuclear power becomes more and more important in many countries worldwide as a basis for current and future electrical energy generation. The largest group of operating nuclear power plants (NPPs) equipped with water-cooled reactors (96% of all NPPs) has gross thermal efficiencies ranging from 30–36%. Such relatively low values of thermal efficiencies are due to lower pressures/temperatures at the inlet to a turbine (4.5–7.8  MPa/257–293°C). However, modern combined-cycle power plants (Brayton gas-turbine cycle and subcritical-pressure steam Rankine cycle, fueled by natural gas) and supercritical-pressure coal-fired power plants have reached gross thermal efficiencies of 62% and 55%, respectively. Therefore, next generation or Generation IV NPPs with water-cooled reactors should have thermal efficiencies as close as possible to those of modern thermal power plants. A significant increase in thermal efficiencies of water-cooled NPPs can be possible only due to increasing turbine inlet parameters above the critical point of water, i.e., supercritical water-cooled reactors (SCWRs) have to be designed. This path of increasing thermal efficiency is considered as a conventional way that coal-fired power plants followed more than 50 years ago. Therefore, an objective of the current paper is a study on neutronics and thermalhydraulics characteristics of a generic 1200-MWel pressure-channel (PCh) SCWR. Standard neutronics codes DRAGON and DONJON have been coupled with a new thermalhydraulics code developed based on the latest empirical heat-transfer correlation, which allowed for more accurate estimation of basic characteristics of a PCh SCWR. In addition, the computational fluid dynamics (CFD) Fluent code has been used for better understanding of the specifics of heat transfer in supercritical water. Future studies will be dedicated to materials and fuels testing in an in-pile supercritical water loop and developing passive safety systems.