Consequences of material effects on in-vessel retention

In-vessel retention (IVR) consists in cooling the corium contained in the reactor vessel by natural convection and reactor cavity flooding. This strategy of severe accident management enables the corium to be kept inside the second confinement barrier: the reactor vessel. The general approach which is used to study IVR problems is a “bounding” approach which consists in assuming a specified corium stratification in the vessel and then demonstrating that the vessel can cope with the resulting thermal and mechanical loads. Thermal loading on the vessel is controlled by the convective heat transfer inside the molten corium in the lower head. If there is no water in the vessel and if the corium pool is overlaid by a liquid steel layer, then the heat flux might focus on the vessel in front of the steel layer (“focusing effect”) and exceed the dry-out heat flux (CHF or DHF). One of the critical points of these studies is linked to the determination of the height of the molten steel layer that can stratify above the oxidic pool. The MASCA experiments have highlighted that part of molten steel may stratify under the oxidic corium which reduces the thickness of the steel layer on top of the pool. This behavior can be explained by chemical interaction between the oxide and metallic phases of the pool which confirms that these materials cannot be treated as inert species. Following these conclusions, a methodology which couples physicochemical effects and thermalhydraulics has been developed to address the IVR issue. The main purpose of this paper is to present this methodology and its application for given corium mass inventories. Attention focuses on the influence of parameters such as the ratio U/Zr and oxidation ratio of zirconia. For a 1000 MW PWR, approximately 10 t of steel stratify at the bottom of the vessel for 40% Zr oxidation, and 25 t for 30% Zr oxidation. This leads to a 25–50% increase of the mass of molten steel that is required for avoiding vessel melt-through.