Simulation of nuclear fuel behavior in accident conditions with the DIONISIO code

Abstract

DIONISIO is a computer code designed to simulate the behavior of one nuclear fuel rod during its permanence within the reactor. Starting from the power history and the external conditions to which the rod is subjected, the code predicts all the meaningful variables of the system. Its application range has been recently extended to include accidental conditions, in particular the so-called loss of coolant accidents (LOCA). In order to make realistic predictions, the conditions in the rod environment have been taken into account since they represent the boundary conditions with which the differential equations describing the fuel phenomena are solved. Without going into the details of the thermalhydraulic modeling, which is the task of the specific codes, a simplified description of the conditions in the cooling channel during a LOCA event has been developed and incorporated as a subroutine of DIONISIO. This has led to an improvement of the fuel behavior simulation, which is evidenced by the considerable number of comparisons with experiments carried out, many of them reported in this paper. Moreover, this work describes a model of high temperature capture and release of hydrogen in the nuclear fuel cladding, in scenarios typical of LOCA events. The corresponding computational model is being separately tested and will be next included in the DIONISIO thermal-hydraulic module.