Severe Accident Management presentation of and technical basis for the current EDF approach

After having recalled that French nuclear plants have not been designed to explicitly address severe accident issues, and that complex situations with multiple failures have been progressively considered and addressed, the authors briefly presents the general organization for accident management, describe how key safety functions are monitored. They indicate the main non redundant information available to the Safety Engineer, evoke the core criticality monitoring, and describe how decay heat removal to the environment, decay heat removal from the core and the containment system integrity are monitored. They give an overview of critical actions, indicate in which cases procedures are shifted from one type to the other (EOP, U2, Severe accident, U5), describe the case of depressurization and water injection in the reactor coolant system or in steam generators, and issues and decisions about containment integrity