Development of Risk Oriented Accident Analysis Methodology for Assessment of Effectiveness of Severe Accident Management Strategy in Nordic BWR

Abstract: Nordic Boiling Water Reactor (BWR) design employs ex-vessel debris coolability as a severe accident management strategy (SAM). In case of a severe accident, the debris ejected from the vessel are expected to fragment, quench and form a debris bed, which is coolable by a natural circulation of water. Success of the existing SAM strategy depends on melt release conditions from the vessel which determine (i) properties of ejected debris and, thus, ex-vessel debris bed coolability, and (ii) potential for energetic melt-coolant interactions (steam explosion). The strategy involves complex interactions between physical phenomena (deterministic) and transient accident scenarios (probabilistic).The aim of this work is further extension, implementation and application of the Risk-Oriented Accident Analysis Methodology (ROAAM) to assessment of the severe accident management strategy effectiveness. ROAAM was originally developed for rare, high-consequence hazards, where both aleatory (stochastic) and epistemic (modeling) uncertainties play a significant role in the risk assessment. The main purpose of ROAAM is to provide the input material to an underlying decision making regarding current safety design acceptance, procedures and possible design modifications.This work reports results of (i) development and implementation of probabilistic framework (ROAAM+) for streamlining sensitivity analysis, uncertainty quantification and risk analysis; (ii) analysis of in-vessel phase of accident progression and melt release conditions in Nordic BWR reactor design with MELCOR code; (iii) analysis of the effect of melt release conditions predicted by MELCOR code on the risk of ex-vessel steam explosion.In ROAAM+, “full models”, such as MELCOR code, are used to develop computationally efficient “surrogate models” to enable extensive uncertainty quantification and failure domain analysis. ROAAM+ analysis identified specific assumptions in MELCOR models, which are currently the major contributors to the uncertainty in the assessment of the SAM effectiveness.