Conclusion

Nuclear safety research programs require the development and maintenance of experimental platforms to simulate the major phenomena that can occur in a nuclear facility in normal or accident situations. Like the phenomena to be simulated, these facilities are complex and require extensive national and international collaboration to exploit their capabilities. These include test reactors (such as the CABRI reactor operated by CEA at the Cadarache center for IRSN) or mock-ups representing part of a nuclear facility on a reduced scale, but sufficient for representative simulation (such as the PKL facility operated by AREVA at its Erlangen site in Germany, which simulates water-steam flows in the cooling circuits of a nuclear reactor in normal or accident situations). These facilities are often the only ones of their kind in the world, and international bodies such as the European Commission,...