Nuclear Safety Research. Experimental Plateforms and Softwares

Research programs in nuclear safety [BN 3 835] are mainly carried out using a combination of analytical experiments, full-scale experiments and numerical simulations.

The purpose of this article is to provide an overview of the experimental facilities and their calculation tools. It is divided into three parts:

• an overview of safety research and its specific features, including the link between experimentation, modeling and software development;

• the description of a selection of five experimental platforms whose characteristics make them unique, and where international programs are most often carried out; they concern five different fields of research: accidental thermal-hydraulics, fuel, material ageing, fire and criticality. These are :

  • the PKL thermal-hydraulic loop (AREVA-Germany), where three international programs (PKL-1, PKL-2 and PKL-3) were carried out under the aegis of the OECD/NEA,)

  • the CABRI experimental reactor (CEA), where an IRSN-led research program on reactivity accidents is being carried out under the aegis of the OECD/NEA (this program is due to continue until 2020),

  • the Norwegian Halden experimental reactor, where since 1958, also under the aegis of the OECD/NEA, research programs have been carried out, the content of which is redefined every three years,

  • the GALAXIE "fire" platform (IRSN), where the PRISME and PRISME2 OECD/NEA programs were carried out,

  • the NCERC (National Criticality Experiment Research Center) platform at the NNSS (Nevada National Security Site), a U.S. government facility dedicated to criticality risk;

• the description of three nuclear safety software packages, dealing respectively with accidental thermalhydraulics, fuel thermomechanics and water reactor core meltdown accidents. These are the CATHARE software developed by CEA with funding from EDF, AREVA and IRSN, the SCANAIR software developed by IRSN, and the ASTEC software jointly developed by IRSN and GRS (Gesellschaft für Anlagen und ReaktorSicherkeit mbH, the German nuclear safety authority). The presentation of these software packages, whose development began in 1979 for CATHARE and in the 1990s for SCANAIR and ASTEC, illustrates in particular the progressive integration of advances in numerical simulation in...