SAFEST (Severe Accident Facilities for European Safety Targets) is a European project networking the European corium experimental laboratories with the objective to establish coordination activities, enabling the development of a common vision and research roadmaps for the next years, and of the management structure to achieve these goals. In this frame, a European roadmap on corium experimental research has been written to define research challenges to contribute to further reinforcement of Gen II and III NPP safety. It is based on the research priorities determined by SARNET SARP group as well as those from the recently formulated in the NUGENIA Roadmap for severe accidents and the recently published NUGENIA Global Vision report. It also takes into account issues identified in the analysis of the European stress tests and from the interpretation of the Fukushima accident. 19 relevant issues related to corium have been selected during these prioritization efforts. These issues have been compared to a survey of the European corium experimental facilities and corium analysis laboratories. Finally, the coherence between European infrastructures and R&D needs has been assessed and a table linking issues and infrastructures has been derived. It shows a few lacks in EU corium infrastructures, especially in the domains of core late reflooding impact on source term, Reactor Pressure Vessel failure and corium release, Spent Fuel Pool accidents, as well as the need for a large mass (100–500 kg) prototypic corium facility.
Irradiation embrittlement of the reactor pressure vessel beltline materials of WWER-440/Type 213 reactors is monitored by a material irradiation surveillance programme. Due to the high lead factor, the duration of the standard surveillance programme is only five years, after which no further surveillance samples remain in the reactor. The large variation and uncertaintity in neutron flux over the irradiated materials produce significant scatter in mechanical properties and necessitate a re-evaluation of results using gamma scanning, specimen reconstitution and recalculation. In order to provide information on the impact of changes in plant operation during later years a supplementary surveillance programme has been devised.
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