Re-assessment of the Phébus FPT-1 test: a stand-alone containment analysis

In the last 40 years, several efforts have been carried out to investigate the release of Fission Products (FPs) from a damaged nuclear core and their subsequent behaviour in the primary circuit and the containment system of a nuclear power plant during a Severe Accident (SA) sequence. The international Phébus experimental program, carried out in the integral Phébus facility at Cadarache (F), was one of the most important research executed in this field. In the present work the stand-alone containment analysis of the Phébus FPT-1 test employing the ASTEC V2.0r3p3 code has been executed. The aims of the present work are: Execute a code-to-code comparison among ASTEC and MELCOR (not discussed here); Shows that too simple nodalisations for the containment are not sufficient to catch the complex phenomena occurring during the test; and Execute detailed sensitivity analyses to show the main parameters influencing the FPs behaviour