Parametric Study on the Organic Iodide Behavior during a Severe Accident

Iodine is a major contributor to the potential health risk for the public following a severe accident from a nuclear power plant. Most of metal-iodides, the major form of iodine that enters the containment, can be readily dissolved in the sump water and result in iodide ions. These will be oxidized to form volatile I2 through a large number of reactions such as radiolysis and hydrolysis. The organic radicals, made from organics such as paint in the sump water, react with iodine to produce organic iodides. Volatile iodine moves from the sump water to the atmosphere mainly by diffusion and natural convection, and react with surfaces and air radiolysis products (ARPs). Painted surfaces act as a sink for I2 and as a source for organic iodides through adsorption and desorption. ARPs react with I2 to form iodine oxides, which leads to the decrease of I2 and organic iodides. Among the large number of iodine species, organic iodides have been extensively studied recently due to their volatility and very low retention. Qualified tools for modeling these phenomena have been developed and validated by several experiments such as EPICUR, PARIS and OECD-BIP. While mechanistic codes model a large number of reactions and species, semiempirical codes such as IODE or IMOD treat major ones. KINS developed a simple iodine model, RAIM (Radio-active iodine chemistry model), based on the IMOD methodology in order to deal with organic iodides conveniently, coupling with an integrated severe-accident analysis code. There are a number of mechanisms that affect the behavior of organic iodides. In this study, effects of pH of the aqueous phase, temperature, radiation dose rate, surface area of organic paints, initial iodine loads that are known to be important to organic iodide formation were studied analytically with RAIM, and also theoretically