ACCIDENTS OF LOSS OF FLOW FOR THE ETTR-2 REACTOR: DETERMINISTIC ANALYSIS

Ahmed Mohammed El-Messiry

National Center for Nuclear Safety and Radiation Control, Atomic Energy Authority, Nasr City 11762, P.O. Box 7551, Cairo, Egypt


The main objective for reactor safety is to keep the fuel in a thermally safe condition with adequate safety margins during all operational modes (normal-abnormal and accidental states). To achieve this purpose an accident analysis of different design base accident (DBA) as loss of flow accident (LOFA), is required for assessing reactor safety. The present work concerns this transients applied to Egypt Test and Research Reactor ETRR-2 (new reactor). An accident analysis code FLOWTR is developed to investigate the thermal behaviour of the core during such flow transients. The active core is simulated by two channels: 1 - hot channel (HC), and 2 - average channel (AC) representing the remainder of the core. Each channel is divided into four axial sections. The external loop, core plene, and core chimney are simulated by different dynamic lumps. The code includes modules for pump coast down, flow regimes, decay heat, temperature distributions, and feedback coefficients. FLOWTR is verified against results from RETRAN code, THERMIC code and commissioning tests for null transient case. The comparison shows a good agreement. The study indicates that for LOFA transients, provided the scram system is available, the core is shutdown safely by low flow signal (496.6 kg/s) at 1.4 s where the HC temperature reaches the maximum value of 45.64°C after shutdown. On the other hand, if the scram system is unavailable, and at t=47.33 s, the core flow decreases to 67.41 kg/s, the HC temperature increases to 164.02°C, and the HC clad surface heat flux exceeds its critical value of 400.00 W/cm2 resulting from the fuel burnout.