Mechanistic modelling of station blackout accidents for a generic 900 MW CANDU plant using the modified RELAP/SCDAPSIM/MOD3.6 code

In this work several mechanistic channel deformation models have been developed and integrated into RELAP/SCDAPSIM/MOD3.6 to provide a coupled treatment of the deformation phase for such postulated accidents. MOD3.6 is a new version of the RELAP/SCDAPSIM code being developed to support the analysis of Pressurized Heavy Water Reactors (PHWRs) under severe accident conditions. In this paper, the code system is used to simulate a postulated station blackout accident for a generic 900 MW CANDU plant. To reduce the uncertainty in the modeling of core disassembly and to overcome the memory constraints of the code, the simulation is broken into two phases with the first phase (i.e., from initiating event to the channel failure and depressurization) simulated using a full-plant RELAP5 model providing relatively high spatial fidelity of the entire heat transport system, and the second phase (i.e. continued from the end of the first phase until calandria vessel dryout) using alternative nodalization focusing on the calandria vessel and fuel channel components. The paper assesses the entire accident progression up to the point of calandria vessel dryout and performs sensitivity analysis on model parameters to assess their relative importance.