DENOPI project devoted to spent fuel pool accidents: overview on the thermal hydraulics experimental facilities
Résumé
Following the 2011 accident at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station, increased attention has been paid to the spent fuel pool under loss-of-cooling or loss-of-coolant accidents (SFP-LOCA). In 2014, the French Institute for Radiological Protection and Reactor Safety (Institut de Radioprotection et de Sûreté Nucléaire - IRSN) in collaboration with partners has launched a research program, named the DENOPI project, to study the phenomenology of SFP-LOCA. This project, supported and funded by the French Government, is composed of experiments, modelisation works and validation of computational tools. As part of this project, two new test facilities were implemented in IRSN laboratories at Cadarache center. The first one, called MIDI, is an experimental investigation tool dealing with the heat and mass transfer phenomena that may occur at an integral scale in a SFP undergoing a loss-of-cooling accident before the fuels get uncovered. The second one, called ASPIC, aims at evaluating the cooling efficiency of a water spray system to cool down an assembly stored in a spent fuel pool during or after dewatering and to assess the properties of two-phase flows in a rod bundle at low pressure and low mass flowrates. After a recall of the main safety issues about SFP-LOCA, this paper is intended to present MIDI and ASPIC facilities and instrumentation capabilities.
Domaines
Physique [physics]
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