Analysis of an unmitigated 2-inch cold leg LOCA transient with ASTEC and MELCOR codes

Abstract

The analyses of postulated severe accident sequences play a key role for the international nuclear technical scientific community for the study of the effect of possible actions to prevent significant core degradation and mitigate source term release. To simulate the complexity of phenomena involved in a severe accident, computational tools, known as severe accident codes, have been developed in the last decades. In the framework of NUGENIA TA-2 ASCOM project, the analysis of an unmitigated 2-inch cold leg LOCA transient, occurring in a generic western three-loops PWR-900 MWe, has been carried out with the aim to give some insights on the modelling capabilities of these tools and to characterize the differences in the calculations results. The ASTEC V2.2b code (study carried out with ASTEC V2, IRSN all rights reserved, [2021]), and MELCOR 2.2 code have been used in this code-to-code benchmark exercise. In the postulated transient, the unavailability of all active injection coolant systems has been considered and only the injection of accumulators has been assumed as accident mitigation strategy.