Investigations of Natural Circulation Instabilities in VVER-type Reactors at LOCA Conditions

An important component of nuclear safety research is the analysis of abnormal transients and accident scenarios in nuclear power plants. In the presented work the ATHLET code was used for thermohydraulic calculations of small and intermediate break loss of coolant accident experiments, which were performed at the Hungarian test facility PMK-2. In the experiments different kinds of natural circulation instabilities could be observed. Such instabilities play an important role in the behaviour of the primary circuit, because the instabilities can disturb the heat removal from the reactor core. The aim of the presented calculations is to investigate whether the code is capable of modelling natural circulation phenomena in VVER-440-type reactors. It could be shown, that ATHLET can calculate the accident behaviour in good agreement with the experimental data. All significant phenomena, such as hot and cold leg loop seal clearing, stagnation of the natural circulation and especially the natural circulation instabilities are calculated very well. Calculations for a VVER-reactor show that the instabilities can also appear in a real plant.