Symposium on Advanced Sensors and Modeling Techniques for Nuclear Reactor Safety

A Review of Core Catchers for Advanced Reactors

In order to address the challenges of severe accident and to ensure safety of people and environment, a core retention device called as “core catcher” has been incorporated in the present and future reactor designs. The concept of core catcher came into existence as early as in early nineties. It is the system which is placed inside the reactor in such a manner that even in the severe accidental scenario, it will retain the corium, quench it and then sustain the coolability of the debris formed due to corium water interactions. From then various approaches to development of core catchers for advanced reactors have been proposed and studied extensively. Since these studies involve milti-component analysis and multi-phase simulations, still there are unresolved issues like Understanding of phenomenology of melt inversion and ablation behaviour Kinetics of chemical interactions of corium and sacrificial materials Model development predicting the behaviour of the sacrificial material with corium.