MARCH 2 simulation of the Power Burst Facility Severe Fuel Damage Scoping Test. Chapter 2

A major portion of the NRC's experimental program on severe fuel damage is being performed in the Power Burst Facility (PBF) at the Idaho National Engineering Laboratory to obtain the data necessary to understand fuel behavior and coolability under severely degraded conditions. The first of a planned series of experiments, the PBF Severe Fuel Damage Scoping Test, was performed on October 29, 1982. This paper presents the results of a MARCH 2 simulation of this experiment. The MARCH (Meltdown Accident Response Characteristics) code describes the physical processes governing the progression of reactor meltdown accidents, from the initiating event through attack of the concrete basemat by the molten core debris. In the present context only the core and primary system aspects of MARCH are of concern. MARCH was originally developed as a tool for use in probabilistic risk assessments of reactors; with increasing interest in severe accident phenomenology, particularly following the accident at Three Mile Island Unit No. 2, versions of the MARCH code have found a variety of applications to phenomenological as well as regulatory issues. Since MARCH is a widely used code, this comparison of the MARCH core modeling with experimental data should be of interest to MARCH code users