Assessment of LOCA with loss of class IV power for CANDU-6 reactors using RELAP-CANDU/SCAN coupled code system

Recently, there is an effort to improve the accuracy and reality in the transient simulation of nuclear power plants. In the prediction of the system transient, the system code simulates the system transient using the power transient curve predicted from the reactor core physics code. However, the pre-calculated power curve could not adequately predict the behavior of power distribution during transient since the coolant density change has influence on the power shape due to the change of the void reactivity. Therefore, the consolidation between the reactor core physics code and the system thermal-hydraulic code takes into consideration to predict more accurate and realistic for the transient simulation. In this regard, there are two codes are developed to assess the safety of CANDU reactor. RELAP-CANDU is a thermal-hydraulic system code for CANDU reactors developed on the basis of RELAP5/MOD3 in such a way to modify inside model for simulating the thermal-hydraulic characteristics of horizontal type reactors. SCAN (SNU CANDU-PHWR Neutronics) is a three dimensional neutronics nodal code to simulate the core physics characteristics for CANDU reactors. To couple SCAN code with RELAP-CANDU code, SCAN code was improved as a spatial kinetics calculation module in such a way to generate a SCAN DLL (dynamic linked library version of SCAN). The coupled code system, RELAP-CANDU/SCAN, enables real-time feedback calculations between thermal-hydraulic variables of RELAP-CANDU and reactor powers of SCAN. To verify the reliability of RELAP-CANDU/SCAN coupled code system, an assessment of 40% reactor inlet header (RIH) break loss of coolant accident (LOCA) with loss of Class IV power (LOP) for Wolsong Unit 2 conducted using RELAP/CANDU-SCAN coupled system. The LOCA with LOP is one of GAI (Generic Action Items) for CANDU reactors issued by CNSC (Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission) and IAEA (International Atomic Energy Agency)