EVALUATION METRICS APPLIED TO ACCIDENT TOLERANT FUEL CLADDING CONCEPTS FOR VVER REACTORS

Abstract

Enhancing the accident tolerance of LWRs became a topic of high interest in many countries after the accidents at Fukushima-Daiichi. Fuel systems that can tolerate a severe accident for a longer time period are referred as Accident Tolerant Fuels (ATF). Development of a new ATF fuel system requires evaluation, characterization and prioritization since many concepts have been investigated during the first development phase. For that reason, evaluation metrics have to be defined, constraints and attributes of each ATF concept have to be studied and finally rating of concepts presented. This paper summarizes evaluation metrics for ATF cladding with a focus on VVER reactor types. Fundamental attributes and evaluation baseline was defined together with illustrative scenarios of severe accidents for modeling purposes and differences between PWR design and VVER design.