Analysis of simulation results of damaged nuclear fuel accidents at NPPs with shell-type nuclear reactors

Abstract

Lessons from the accident at the Fukushima Daiichi NPP made it necessary to reevaluate and intensificate the work on modeling and analyzing various scenarios of severe accidents with damage to the nuclear fuel in the reactor, containment and spent nuclear fuel storage pool with the expansion of the primary initiating event causes group listing. Further development of computational tools for modeling the explosion prevention criteria as to steam and gas mixtures, considering the specific thermal-hydrodynamic conditions and mechanisms of explosive situations arrival at different stages of a severe accident development, is substantiated. Based on the analysis of the known shell-type nuclear reactors accidents results the explosion safety thermodynamic criteria are presented, the parameters defining the steam and gas explosions conditions are found, the need to perform the further verification and validation of deterministic codes serving to simulate general accident processes behavior as well as phase-to-phase interaction calculated dependencies is established. The main parameters controlling and defining the criteria explosion safety effective regulation areas and their optimization conditions are found.

Keywords

• severe accidents modeling
• nuclear power plant
• Fukushima accident
• initiating event