Experimental investigation on melt coolability under bottom flooding with and without decay heat simulation

Investigations on severe accident phenomena help us in understanding the realistic accidental phenomena for the assessment of associated risk. The societal impact of radiological leakage to the environment has demanded further robustness in the line of defence of nuclear safety. Thus, to ensure the cooling and stabilization of corium within reactor containment in case of severe accident scenarios, many new reactors have been envisaged with core catcher. In this regard, corium coolability still remains an unresolved issue in spite of several efforts being taken towards its understanding. After studying the various cooling strategies, it has been demonstrated that melt coolability using bottom flooding of water is one of the most efficient techniques so far. To study the effect of decay heat on melt pool coolability under bottom flooding condition, two experiments have been performed in this paper; one without the decay heat and the other with decay heat. The test section used for carrying out these experiments consisted of two parts viz. lower part for retaining the melt from furnace, water inlet and melt quenching, and upper part for steam expansion and its outlet. The total height of the test section was 1400 mm and was made of 33 mm thick carbon steel. Total six stainless steel nozzles of diameter 12 mm were used for injecting water at the bottom of the melt pool. The lower part was surrounded by 10 radiative heaters to simulate decay heat of 10 kW which corresponds to 0.5 MW/m3. The experiments showed that quenching of about 25 l of melt at initial temperature of nearly 1200 °C took only a few minutes in both the cases. The debris formed in the experiments ranged between 0.5 mm fine particles to 50 mm porous chunks. The measured porosities were nearly 51% without decay heat and nearly 67% with decay heat. This paper presents the comparative experimental study of melt coolability using bottom flooding without and with decay heat scenarios. The experimental measurements show that the quenching behaviour of melt pool is not affected by decay heat, although stabilization of debris temperatures to saturation temperature takes a bit longer duration as compared to without decay heat scenarios.