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Lead-based reactor nuclear power has the advantages of inherent safety, compact size, light weight, long service life, and high efficiency, and it is widely applied to advanced marine equipment, unmanned underwater vehicles, and deep-sea space stations for energy and power purposes. Conducting research on lead-based reactor marine nuclear power is key to the technological innovation of energy and power for marine equipment in China. This study clarifies the application scenarios and development demands of marine nuclear power, summarizes the development status of lead-based reactor nuclear power from the aspects of technical characteristics, representative applications, and research status, and analyzes corresponding key technologies including nuclear fuel and cladding materials, key components in the primary loop, coolant processes and oxygen control, and advanced power generation technologies. Moreover, the study explores the development challenges for lead-based reactor marine nuclear power and proposes there feasible technical routes: low-temperature lead-based reactor marine nuclear power, high-temperature and high-efficiency lead-based reactor marine nuclear power, and integrated natural-circulation lead-based reactor marine nuclear power. Furthermore, we propose the following suggestions to promote the leapfrog development of marine nuclear power in China:(1) strengthening research and development (R&D) of specialized technologies for the lead-based reactor marine nuclear power and accelerating the deployment of demonstrative projects; (2) incorporating lead-based reactors into the country's major energy strategies and creating a standards system; (3) establishing national joint R&D centers and creating new models for technological innovation and industrial development.

Lead-cooled fast reactors have multilayered designs and large internal temperature differences, which cause challenges in simulating reactor physics. SuperMC, a large-scale integrated software system for neutronics design, is inherently able to address complex geometries and multi-temperature problems. The purpose of this study is to verify the applicability of SuperMC to the lead-bismuth-cooled fast reactor RBEC-M. The multi-temperature cross-section generation function of SuperMC was employed and showed good performance. Based on the ENDF/B-VII.1 library, the effective multiplication factor keff obtained by SuperMC showed good agreement with those from previous works. The relationship of keff and 15N enrichment applied to the fuel material was also studied, with the results showing that in creased 15N could significantly improve keff. The axial power profile and kinetics parameters for the bench mark were then calculated and analyzed. This work thus verified the applicability of SuperMC for comprehensive neutronics simulations for lead-bismuth-cooled fast reactors.