Overview of progress in the Corium area

Within SARNET, Corium topic covers all the behavior of corium from early phase of core degradation up to in or ex-vessel corium recovery issues with the exception of corium interaction with water, the direct containment heating and the fission products release. During EURSAFE European PIRT exercise, 311 phenomena have been identified for corium area and 54 were selected for additional needed research according to their importance from safety point of view. The Corium topic regroups in three work packages the critical mass of competence to improve significantly the corium behaviour knowledge. The spirit of the SARNET networking is to share the knowledge, the facilities and the simulation tools to reach a better efficiency and to rationalise the R and D effort at European level. At mid term, all the knowledge will be accumulate in ASTEC safety code through physical model improvements and extension of validation database. This paper summarizes the progresses that have been achieved in the frame of the networking activities and underlines also the orientation of the corium work packages tasks for the next period. (author)