Investigations on in-vessel melt retention by external cooling for a generic VVER-1000 reactor

Tusheva, P.; Altstadt, E.; Willschütz, H.-G.; Fridman, E.; Weiß, Frank-Peter

doi:10.1016/j.anucene.2014.07.044

Cited by 20 publications

(1 citation statement)

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“…In most accident situations, the RPV safety should be ensured during the first 72 h, so it leaves enough time for the operator to take some emergence measures (Mao et al, 2016a). However, certain thermal-mechanical loading processes (or history) may accelerate or delay RPV failure time (Tsai et al, 2017;Tusheva et al, 2015). Furthermore, the failure mode as well as site can be significantly different for various loading situations.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Structural integrity investigation for RPV with various cooling water levels under pressurized melting pool

et al. 2018

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Abstract. The strategy denoted as "in-vessel retention (IVR)" is widely used in severe accident (SA) management by most advanced nuclear power plants. The essence of IVR mitigation is to provide long-term external water cooling in maintaining the reactor pressure vessel (RPV) integrity. Actually, the traditional IVR concept assumed that RPV was fully submerged into the water flooding, and the melting pool was depressurized during the SA. The above assumptions weren't seriously challenged until the occurrence of Fukushima accident on 2011, suggesting the structural behavior had not been appropriately assessed. Therefore, the paper tries to address the structure-related issue on determining whether RPV safety can be maintained or not with the effect of various water levels and internal pressures created from core meltdown accident. In achieving it, the RPV structural behaviors are numerically investigated in terms of several field parameters, such as temperature, deformation, stress, plastic strain, creep strain, and total damage. Due to the presence of high temperature melt on the inside and water cooling on the outside, the RPV failure is governed by the failure mechanisms of creep, thermal-plasticity and plasticity. The creep and plastic damages are interacted with each other, which further accelerate the failure process. Through detailed investigation, it is found that the internal pressure as well as water levels plays an important role in determining the RPV failure time, mode and site.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%