Joint Development of SAS4A Code in Application to Oxide-fueled LFR Severe Accident Analysis
- Argonne National Lab. (ANL), Argonne, IL (United States)
- Westinghouse Electric Co., LLC, Cranberry Township, PA (United States)
The scope of this project was to pursue specific SAS4A liquid-metal cooled reactor (LMR) safety analysis software extensions to simulate postulated accidents with fuel failures for oxide-fueled Lead-cooled Fast Reactors (LFRs). Since most U.S. LMR experience is on sodium-cooled fast reactor options based on past testing and operation experience with EBR-II and FFTF, the DOE’s legacy fast reactor safety analysis capabilities were focused on metal-fueled pool-type concepts with sodium coolant. In recent years, Westinghouse Electric Company (WEC) has decided to pursue an LFR design as one of their next generation nuclear technology options because of its favorable safety and economics attributes. Oxide fuel is considered among other fuel options due to previous WEC experience with this fuel form. Development of this new technology requires the availability of adequately accurate computational tools, some of which can be adapted from versions of similar software used for analysis of other LMRs. Although Argonne National Laboratory’s (ANL) SAS4A/SASSYS-1 safety analysis software suite (shortened as SAS4A code hereafter for brevity) has the basic capabilities to model LFR system designs, the SAS4A code modules used in the analysis of accidents with fuel/cladding failures lack appropriate models for the unique phenomena that govern as-irradiated oxide-fuel damage mechanisms in lead coolant. Therefore, the objective of this project was to extend the capabilities of SAS4A with mechanistic oxide-fuel failure models in lead coolant for margin to failure assessments, analysis of failure modes, location and timing of failures under different accident scenarios consistent with the whole-plant dynamic response including the reactivity feedback, and assessment of the potential for fuel damage propagation due to potential fission gas jet and fuel-fragment/molten fuel impingement to neighboring fuel pins in an assembly. This report provides mainly a summary of Argonne’s technical contributions in the joint project, but the reports and publications by the Participant team are included as references at the end of the report.
- Research Organization:
- Argonne National Lab. (ANL), Argonne, IL (United States); Westinghouse Electric Company, LLC, Cranberry Township, PA (United States)
- Sponsoring Organization:
- USDOE Office of Technology Transitions (OTT)
- DOE Contract Number:
- AC02-06CH11357
- OSTI ID:
- 1615934
- Report Number(s):
- ANL/NSE-C-2017-17150; 159613; TRN: US2104901
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
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