Evaluation of recirculation sump performance for OPR1000 plant: Part I debris transport during the blow-down phase of LOCA

Abstract: After TMI-2 accident, long-term core cooling management takes more importance rather than short-term management since probabilistic safety assessment performed revealed that long-term management had higher risk than the risk from short-term management. Regarding to this, since 1992, blockage of sump suction strainer was taken a place in Barseback Unit 2 (Sweden, BWR) and the United States Nuclear Regulatory Commission (USNRC) took into consideration as a General Safety Issue 191 (GSI-191), “PWR Sump Blockage,” in 1998 and opening an investigation. As a response to GSI-191 the Nuclear Energy Institute (NEI) submitted a recirculation sump evaluation methodology called NEI 04–07. In this methodology 0.75 was recommended for blow-down transport to lower containment based on the study on a boiling water reactor sump clogging issue and engineering judgment. USNRC quantitatively evaluated the blow-down transport in the safety evaluation report to NEI 04–07, and concluded the recommended blow-down transport fraction in NEI 04–07 was sufficiently conservative. However, the safety evaluation report to NEI 04–07 includes many values in evaluation steps which depend much on the containment configuration and engineering judgment. In particular the dependency on the plant type limits the generality of the USNRC’s conclusion on blow-down transport, when the considered plant is different from the volunteer plant. This study provides a modified evaluation method and results of debris blow-down transport for an Optimized Power Reactor 1000MWe (OPR1000) in Korea. The modified method includes more realistic physical background with less uncertainty while providing consistent result with NEI and USNRC methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]