Study on in-vessel injection strategy for IVR improvement

Abstract

In-vessel retention (IVR) of molten core debris is a significant severe accident management strategy to prevent vessel failure and subsequent debris relocation to the containment. High-risk ex-vessel phenomena such as steam explosion, core-concrete interaction (CCI) that may challenge the containment integrity are eliminated by successful IVR measures. In unmitigated severe accident, loss of cooling leads to core heat-up and molten debris relocates into the plenum of reactor vessel. High heat flux from molten pool to the vessel may melt through the wall, which depends on stratification of the debris and critical heat flux (CHF) of the ex − vessel surface. The debris configuration used to be postulated as a metal layer floating on the oxide layer. Nowadays thin metal layer over an oxide layer and bottom metal layer configuration is considered as the limiting and reasonable assumption. For high power nuclear power plant (NPP) with less metal in molten pool, if three-layer molten pool formed in the reactor vessel lower head, top thin metal layer may lead to focusing effect and challenge the integrity of vessel. In-vessel injection is recommended to mitigate focusing effect.CAP1400 is designed as passive GEN-III PWR and adopts IVR as main severe accident management strategy. For CAP1400 NPP IVR design, reactor cavity flooding system provides enough containment water level for natural circulation ex-vessel cooling, which is beneficial to water backflow from break. Emergency operating procedure (EOP) and severe accident management guideline (SAMG) also instruct plant staff recovering other engineering injection path to the reactor vessel manually. Therefore lower head debris decay heat removal is achieved by both in-vessel and ex-vessel cooling. Experiments show that debris top cooling heat transfer is enhanced compared to the one predicted by film boiling correlation. Heat transfer model was established to investigate the top cooling capability, including natural convection, radiation heat transfer, nucleate boiling and film boiling. Two classic three − layer molten pool scenarios were analyzed, according to the CAP1400 severe accident sequence and debris quality participated in interaction. Results show that some of the three − layer assumption cannot lead to vessel failure without in − vessel injection. For more limiting three − layer case, heat flux to the vessel wall decreases lower than CHF with conservative top cooling heat flux. Based on the test and deterministic assessment, there is reasonable assurance that the IVR strategy is successful by both in-vessel and ex-vessel cooling.