Abstract
In the current state of maturity of severe accident codes, the time has come to foster the systematic application of Best Estimate Plus Uncertainties (BEPU) in this domain. The overall objective of the HORIZON-2020 project on “Management and Uncertainties of Severe Accidents (MUSA)” is to quantify the uncertainties of severe accident codes (e.g., ASTEC, MAAP, MELCOR, and AC2) when modeling reactor and spent fuel pools accident scenarios of Gen II and Gen III reactor designs for the prediction of the radiological source term. To do so, different Uncertainty Quantification (UQ) methodologies are to be used for the uncertainty and sensitivity analysis. Innovative AM measures will be considered in performing these UQ analyses, in addition to initial/boundary conditions and model parameters, to assess their impact on the source term prediction. This paper synthesizes the major pillars and the overall structure of the MUSA project, as well as the expectations and the progress made over the first year and a half of operation.
Highlights
Numerical simulation tools are widely used in the nuclear community to assess the behavior of Nuclear Power Plants (NPP) during postulated accidents, including severe accidents
Management (AM) measures, aiming at preventing and mitigating the consequences of a severe accident, heavily rely on numerical simulations, with codes such as ASTEC [1], AC2 [2], MAAP [3], MELCOR [4], and so on. Since these tools predict important parameters such as the time of failure of the plant safety barriers, on one hand, and the potential radiological source term released into the environment if the safety barriers fail, on the other hand, it is of paramount importance to assure their highest accuracy
The Management and Uncertainties of Severe Accidents (MUSA) project will contribute to the determination of the state of the art on the application of Uncertainty Quantification (UQ) methods to severe accident codes, regarding their prediction of the source term that potentially may be released to the external environment and to the quantification of the associated code’s uncertainties, applied for the analysis of these severe scenarios in both
Summary
Numerical simulation tools are widely used in the nuclear community to assess the behavior of Nuclear Power Plants (NPP) during postulated accidents, including severe accidents. Many severe accident codes have reached a high enough level of maturity with regards to their modelling scope and accuracy, simulation capability of safety-relevant phenomena, and validation for a large number of reactor types and numerical stability, and extensive applications in industrial, regulatory, and research areas can be found [6] They are extensively employed for the development and optimization of AM measures and to provide the source term to estimate the radiological impact of an accident on and around the NPP site. It is a particular goal of MUSA to develop innovative AM strategies for these SFP accidents
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