Numerical analyses of design extension conditions for sodium-cooled fast reactor designed in Japan

Yamano, Hidemasa   ; Kubo, Shigenobu ; Tokizaki, Minako*; Nakamura, Hironori*

Specific design features of advanced sodium-cooled fast reactors (SFRs) designed in Japan are a passive reactor shutdown system, a passive decay heat removal system (DHRS), and an in-vessel retention (IVR) concept against an anticipated transients without scram (ATWS) in design extension condition (DECs). The present paper describes numerical analysis methodologies for event sequences studied in Japan and some numerical analyses of DECs to show the effectiveness of the passive shutdown system against a typical ATWS and severe accident mitigation measures for the IVR of molten core. For the passive shutdown capability, the numerical analysis has demonstrated the effectiveness of a self-actuated shutdown system against a severe ATWS event, for which the temperature response time was separately evaluated by a computational fluid dynamics (CFD) code. A recently developed debris-bed cooling analysis methodology coupled with a CFD code and a debris-bed module has successfully simulated a three-dimensional coolant flow field near the debris bed with the passive DHRS capability in order to demonstrate the debris-bed coolability on a core catcher.