Progress and perspectives of ASTEC applications in the European Network SARNET

Titre du congrès :EUROSAFE 2006 Radioactive Waste Management Ville du congrès :Paris Date du congrès :13/11/2006

The ASTEC integral code is jointly developed by IRSN (France) and GRS (Germany) for LWR source term Severe Accident (SA) evaluation, PSA level 2 studies and SA management evaluation. ASTEC constitutes now the reference European integral code through its role in the Network SARNET (Severe Accident Network of Excellence) in the EC 6th Framework Program. The models of next version V1.3, released before end of 2006, represent the current State of the Art, its validation is very extensive (in particular on Phébus FP) and, after next implementation of a model for reflooding of degraded cores, it will cover all needs for SA evaluation in PWR and VVER. It will be the reference code for the IRSN PSA level 2 (Probabilistic Safety Analysis) on French PWR 1300 MWe that starts in 2006. In the frame of SARNET, IRSN coordinates the ASTEC Topic gathering 30 partners that assess the code through validation against experiments and benchmarks with reference codes like CATHARE or RELAP5 for the reactor coolant circuit and COCOSYS for the containment. Plant application calculations are compared with MELCOR and MAAP4 results for a series of different SA sequences. Besides, the knowledge generated by SARNET Topics (Corium, Source Term and Containment) will be progressively integrated into the code through improved or new models.