OECD MCCI Project: Category 2 Coolability Engineering Enhancement Tests: Water-Cooled Basemat Test 1 (WCB-1) Data Report
- Argonne National Lab. (ANL), Argonne, IL (United States). Nuclear Engineering Division
Ex-vessel debris coolability is an important light water reactor (LWR) safety issue. For existing plants, resolution of this issue will confirm the technical basis for severe accident management guidelines (SAMGs). For new reactors, understanding this issue will help confirm the effectiveness of the design and implementation of new accident mitigation features and severe accident management design alternatives (SAMDAs). The first OECD-MCCI program conducted reactor material experiments focused on achieving the following technical objectives: i) provide confirmatory evidence and data for various cooling mechanisms through separate effect tests for severe accident model development, and ii) provide long-term 2-D core-concrete interaction data for code assessment and improvement. Based on the MB directive, the project developed a test plan for a Water-Cooled Basemat test (WCB-1) for PRG consideration. This report was reviewed by the PRG, and after several revisions, the plan was eventually adopted as the basis for conducting the experiment. Test specifications are provided. The experiment approach was to incorporate a water-cooled basemat into the core-concrete interaction test apparatus. The basemat was composed of five parallel water channels that were instrumented to provide both local and global data on the heat transfer performance. The basemat was covered with a layer of sacrificial concrete that would be ablated by the overlying melt at the start of the experiment. Eventually, the melt would approach and then be thermally stabilized at the interface of the water-cooled basemat. The test was thus designed to provide prototypic data on the transient evolution and stabilization of a core melt in a generic watercooled core catcher design for advanced plant applications. WCB-1 was conducted on July 29, 2009. The objective of this data report is to document the thermal-hydraulic as well as posttest examination results from this experiment. To this end, a description of the test apparatus is provided first, followed by descriptions of the test operating procedure and key experiment results.
- Research Organization:
- Argonne National Lab. (ANL), Argonne, IL (United States)
- Sponsoring Organization:
- USDOE; Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC); Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) - Nuclear Energy Agency
- DOE Contract Number:
- AC02-06CH11357
- OSTI ID:
- 1177576
- Report Number(s):
- OECD/MCCI-2009-TR05; 114400
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
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