The station blackout accident in a dual-cooled annular fuel of a VVER-1000 reactor with application of portable pumps for mitigating the accident

A.M. Mehri | S. Talebi | Omid Safarzadeh

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URL :   http://research.shahed.ac.ir/WSR/WebPages/Report/PaperView.aspx?PaperID=147983
Date :  2020/11/11
Publish in :    Annals of Nuclear Energy
DOI :  https://doi.org/10.1016/j.anucene.2020.107964
Link :  https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0306454920306605
Keywords :Annular fuel, SBO, Portable pump, Accident tolerant fuel, VVER-1000, RELAP5

Abstract :

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The station blackout accident is clearly a very serious problem that jeopardizes the safety barrier of nuclear reactor and ascends the core integrity steeply. The dual-cooled annular fuel has been introduced to boost the generated power density and safety margins. The fuel is cooled both internally and externally by allowing the liquid to flow on inner and outer heated surfaces. The fuel peak temperature can be reduced substantially by decreasing the fuel rod cladding heat flux leading to an increment on the DNBR. In this paper, a dual cooled annular fuel a VVER-1000 is investigated in this accident scenarios. The deployment of portable pumps for injecting coolant to dual cooled annular fuel core to mitigate this accident is also considered. The effect of accident tolerant fuel rod cladding is also investigated. The RELAP5 model is used to model the annular fuel to perform the analysis. The results are compared to traditional solid fuel geometry.