Experiences from the cutting of metallic blocks from simulant Fukushima Daiichi fuel debris

Journeau, C.*; Molina, D.*; Brackx, E.*; Berlemont, R.*; Tsubota, Yoichi

Journal of Nuclear Science and Technology, 61(9), p.1239 - 1247, 2024/09

https://doi.org/10.1080/00223131.2024.2310580

CEA has manufactured a series of Fukushima Daiichi fuel debris simulants, either with depleted uranium oxide or with hafnium oxide as a surrogate of UO. In ex-vessel compositions resulting from an interaction between corium and concrete, the oxidic phase density becomes lighter than that of the metallic phase, which segregates at the bottom. Three of these metallic phases have been mechanically cut at CEA Cadarache with handsaw and with core boring tool in FUJISAN facility. It appeared that two of these metallic blocks were extremely hard to cut (one from a fabrication with uranium oxide, the other from a simulant block) while the last one was more easily cut. The similarities and differences in metallographic analyses (SEM-EDS and XRD) of these three metal blocks will be presented and discussed. This experience provides useful learnings in view of the cutting and retrieval of fuel debris from Fukushima Daiichi

Aerosol characterization during heating and mechanical cutting of simulated uranium containing debris; The URASOL project in the framework of Fukushima Daiichi fuel debris removal

Porcheron, E.*; Journeau, C.*; Delacroix, J.*; Berlemont, R.*; Bouland, A.*; Lallot, Y.*; Tsubota, Yoichi; Ikeda, Atsushi; Mitsugi, Takeshi

Proceedings of International Conference on Environmental Remediation and Radioactive Waste Management (ICEM2023) (Internet), 5 Pages, 2023/10

https://doi.org/10.1115/ICEM2023-110133

Results of the URASOL project aimed at evaluating the generation and dispersion of radioactive aerosols during the cutting of fuel debris, a key issue in the decommissioning of the damaged reactors at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station (1F), are presented in this report. Characterization of aerosols generated during heating and mechanical cutting of simulated fuel debris in terms of mass concentration, real-time number density, mass-based particle size distribution, morphology, and chemical properties is reported. In the heating tests, an increase in particle size with increasing temperature was observed, and in terms of particle number density, the case using depleted uranium simulated fuel debris had a smaller number density than the test using Hf-containing simulated fuel debris. In mechanical cleavage, the aerodynamic median mass diameter of the aerosol was almost the same for the radioactive and non-radioactive samples (about 3.74.4 m).

Chemical composition of aerosols generated by heating prototypic fuel debris samples

Journeau, C.*; Delacroix, J.*; Guvar, C.*; Testud, V.*; Brackx, E.*; Porcheron, E.*; Bouland, A.*; Berlemont, R.*; Ikeda, Atsushi

Science Talks (Internet), 6, p.100215_1 - 100215_9, 2023/05

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.sctalk.2023.100215

Aerosol characterization during heating and mechanical cutting of simulated uranium containing debris; The URASOL project in the framework of Fukushima Daiichi fuel debris removal

Porcheron, E.*; Leblois, Y.*; Journeau, C.*; Delacroix, J.*; Molina, D.*; Suteau, C.*; Berlemont, R.*; Bouland, A.*; Lallot, Y.*; Roulet, D.*; et al.

Proceedings of International Topical Workshop on Fukushima Decommissioning Research (FDR2022) (Internet), 5 Pages, 2022/10

One of the important challenges for the decommissioning of the damaged reactors of the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station (1F) is the fuel debris retrieval. The URASOL project, which is undertaken by a French consortium consisting of ONET Technologies, CEA, and IRSN for JAEA/CLADS, is dedicated to acquiring basic scientific data on the generation and characteristics of radioactive aerosols from the thermal or mechanical processing of fuel debris simulant. Heating process undertaken in the VITAE facility simulates some representative conditions of thermal cutting by LASER. For mechanical cutting, the core boring technique is implemented in the FUJISAN facility. Fuel debris simulants have been developed for inactive and active trials. The aerosols are characterized in terms of mass concentration, real time number concentration, mass size distribution, morphology, and chemical properties. The chemical characterization aims at identifying potential radioactive particles released and the associated size distribution, both of which are important information for assessing possible safety and radioprotection measures during the fuel debris retrieval operations at 1F.

Modelling and simulation of the source term for a sodium cooled fast reactor under hypothetical severe accident conditions; Final report of a coordinated research project

Arokiaswamy, J. A.*; Batra, C.*; Chang, J. E.*; Garcia, M.*; Herranz, L. E.*; Klimonov, I. A.*; Kriventsev, V.*; Li, S.*; Liegeard, C.*; Mahanes, J.*; et al.

IAEA-TECDOC-2006, 380 Pages, 2022/00

https://www.iaea.org/publications/15086/modelling-and-simulation-of-the-source-term-for-a-sodium-cooled-fast-reactor-under-hypothetical-severe-accident-conditions

The IAEA coordinated research project on "Radioactive Release from the Prototype Sodium Cooled Fast Reactor under Severe Accident Conditions" was devoted to realistic numerical simulation of fission products and fuel particles inventory inside the reference sodium cooled fast reactor volumes under severe accident conditions at different time scales. The scope of analysis was divided into three parts, defined as three work packages (WPs): (1) in-vessel source term estimation; (2) primary system/containment system interface source term estimation; and, (3) in-containment phenomenology analysis. Comparison of the results obtained in WP-1 indicates that the release fractions of noble gases and cesium radionuclides, and fractions of radionuclides released to the cover gas are in a good agreement. In the analysis using a common pressure history in WP-2, the results were in good agreement indicating that the accuracy of the analysis method of each institution is almost the same. The standalone case, which uses a set of pre-defined release fractions, was defined for WP-3 which enables to decouple this part of analysis from previous WPs. There is broad consensus among the predicted results by all the participants in WP-3.

Characterization of high-temperature nuclear fuel-coolant interactions through X-ray visualization and image processing

Johnson, M.*; Journeau, C.*; Matsuba, Kenichi; Emura, Yuki; Kamiyama, Kenji

Annals of Nuclear Energy, 151, p.107881_1 - 107881_13, 2021/02

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.anucene.2020.107881

High-resolution X-ray imaging was employed at the JAEA MELT facility to visualize a kilogram-scale interaction between a jet of high temperature molten stainless steel and sodium. A novel software, SPECTRA, has been developed for the quantitative characterization of jet quenching and fragmentation. Tracking and 3D reconstruction of the melt phase traversing the imaging window enabled the detection of 72% of the debris mass recovered post-experiment. The rebounding of melt fragments confirmed a solid outer crust at the melt-coolant interface, while a thermal fragmentation event induced rapid vapor expansion. Jet fragmentation is best explained by the vaporization of coolant entrained within the melt jet generating an internal over-pressure sufficient for fragmentation of the crust. Thermal fragmentation produced a bimodal debris size distribution of coarse jet shells and finer fragments.

Compressing the time series of five dimensional distribution function data from gyrokinetic simulation using principal component analysis

Asahi, Yuichi; Fujii, Keisuke*; Heim, D. M.*; Maeyama, Shinya*; Garbet, X.*; Grandgirard, V.*; Sarazin, Y.*; Dif-Pradalier, G.*; Idomura, Yasuhiro; Yagi, Masatoshi*

Physics of Plasmas, 28(1), p.012304_1 - 012304_21, 2021/01

AA2020-0790.pdf:7.13MB

https://doi.org/10.1063/5.0023166

This article demonstrates a data compression technique for the time series of five dimensional distribution function data based on Principal Component Analysis (PCA). Phase space bases and corresponding coefficients are constructed by PCA in order to reduce the data size and the dimensionality. It is shown that about 83% of the variance of the original five dimensional distribution can be expressed with 64 components. This leads to the compression of the degrees of freedom from to . One of the important findings - resulting from the detailed analysis of the contribution of each principal component to the energy flux - deals with avalanche events, which are found to be mostly driven by coherent structures in the phase space, indicating the key role of resonant particles.

Benchmarks of depletion and decay heat calculation between MENDEL and MARBLE

Yokoyama, Kenji; Lahaye, S.*

Proceedings of Joint International Conference on Supercomputing in Nuclear Applications + Monte Carlo 2020 (SNA + MC 2020), p.109 - 116, 2020/10

CEA/DEN/DM2S/SERMA and JAEA/NSEC are working on benchmarks for burnup, isotopic concentrations and decay heat calculations in the collaboration framework between both organisms. Both actors of this benchmark are independently developing their own simulation code systems for computing quantities of interest in nuclear fuel cycle domain: MENDEL in CEA and MARBLE in JAEA. The purpose of the benchmark is to verify each system by comparing both calculation results on specific applications. MENDEL uses a several solvers for the resolution of Bateman equation. Runge-Kutta method or Chebyshev Rational Approximation method (CRAM) are used for irradiation computations. An analytical solver can also be used for decay calculations. MARBLE can use Krylov subspace method or CRAM method. As the first phase of the benchmark, we compared the calculated results of decay heat and isotropic concentrations following by a Pu-239 fast fission pulse. We applied nuclear data from three libraries: (1) JEFF-3.1.1, (2) JENDL/DDF-2015 + JENDL/FPY-2011, and (3) ENDF/B-VII.1. Nuclear data and burnup chain were generated from these libraries independently on each system. We confirmed that the results for both systems were in very good agreement with each other. Numerical results were also compared to experimental data. As the second phase of the benchmark, we are proceeding with a burnup calculation benchmark of MENDEL and MARBLE using the nuclear data and burnup chain provided by ORLIBJ33, which is a set of cross-section data based on JENDL-3.3 for ORIGEN-2 code system. We will also compare with calculation results by the ORIGEN-2 code with ORLIBJ33. Since the series of ORLIB, that is, ORLIBJ32, ORLIBJ33, and ORLIBJ40, have been widely used especially in Japan for many years, the comparison with ORLIB is effective for confirming the performance of MENDEL and MARBLE.

Leaching behavior of prototypical Corium samples; A Step to understand the interactions between the fuel debris and water at the Fukushima Daiichi reactors

Nakayoshi, Akira; Jegou, C.*; De Windt, L.*; Perrin, S.*; Washiya, Tadahiro

Nuclear Engineering and Design, 360, p.110522_1 - 110522_18, 2020/04

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.nucengdes.2020.110522

Routing study of above core structure with mock-up experiment for ASTRID

Takano, Kazuya; Sakamoto, Yoshihiko; Morohoshi, Kyoichi*; Okazaki, Hitoshi*; Gima, Hiromichi*; Teramae, Takuma*; Ikarimoto, Iwao*; Botte, F.*; Dirat, J.-F.*; Dechelette, F.*

Proceedings of 2019 International Congress on Advances in Nuclear Power Plants (ICAPP 2019) (Internet), 8 Pages, 2019/05

ASTRID has the objective to integrate innovative options in order to prepare the 4th generation reactors. In ASTRID, large number of tubes are installed above each fuel subassembly to monitor the core. These instrumentations such as thermocouples (TC) and Failed Fuel Detection and Location (FFDL) systems are integrated into Above Core Structure (ACS) with various sizes tubes. In the present study, the routing study for TC tubes and FFDL tubes was performed with 3D modeling and mock-up experiment of the ACS designed for ASTRID with 1500 MW thermal power in order to clarify the integration process and secure the design hypotheses. Although some problems on fabricability were found in the mock-up experiment, the possible solutions were proposed. The present study gives manufacturing feedback to design team and will contribute to increase the knowledge for ACS design and fabricability.