The 5th International Symposium on Supercritical Water-cooled Reactors (ISSCWR-5) begins on March 14 2011 in Vancouver. The conference gets underway with five plenary addresses by national and international program managers of respective SCWR/HPLWR programs on the morning of the first day, Monday, and then branches off into three parallel technical sessions in the afternoon: on SCWR Core Design; on Materials Issues and on General Thermalhydraulics and Safety, chaired by international authorities in these respective fields. The session on General Thermalhydraulics and Safety will be co-chaired by Sama Bilbao y Leon of Virginia Commonwealth University and Jovica Riznik of the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission.
This pattern of technical sessions continues also on Tuesday; an important facet of the Tuesday morning sessions will be regulatory considerations: a talk by Alexandre Viktorov of the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission will be on Regulatory Expectations for Advanced Reactors, while Ima Ituen and David Novog of McMaster University will present on Assessing the Applicability of Canadian Regulations to the SCWR.
On Wednesday morning, there are sessions on Safety Issues and non-Aqueous Fluid Heat Transfer, the latter referring especially to experiments on supercritical carbon dioxide, where considerations on fluid-to-fluid scaling are important in interpreting the results and applying them to the real working fluid, supercritical water. Of the many interesting papers, one which describes a supercritical loop for in-pile testing of materials seemed especially interesting.
On all three days, the pattern of three parallel technical sessions is maintained, testifying to the high level and quality of national and international participation in the conference, and the interesting work on the SCWR that continues apace through the Gen-IV International Forum (GIF). Canada, as the host country [and also the country that formally leads R&D on the SCWR under the GIF] has the highest number of papers - both established groups and newer ones, and both senior researchers and students are presenting papers. Importantly, the Canadian participation shows significant engagement with the SCWR concept, across all major stakeholders: by academic groups, by regulatory authorities, as well as by R&D Labs and industrial firms.
The conference closes on Thursday with a tour of TRIUMF, Canada's national laboratory for nuclear and particle physics, located on the campus of the University of British Columbia. The scenic locale of the conference in Vancouver, and the very interesting papers to be presented, and discussions to be had, plus the social and cultural programs and the tour of TRIUMF promise to make this a most memorable conference in the biannual ISSCWR series.
