Preliminary thermal-hydraulic deterministic safety analysis of an in-vessel LOCA for the DTT facility

Abstract

Abstract The DTT (Divertor Tokamak Test) facility is a new experimental tokamak under development by an Italian consortium in cooperation with several high-standard European laboratories. The ENEA division FSN-SICNUC is involved in the project for carrying out deterministic safety analysis of postulated accidents. In the first year of activity, it has been analyzed an In-Vessel LOCA (IVLOCA) scenario. The IVLOCA scenario selected is caused by a break in the divertor’s cassette cooling tubes with the consequent release of coolant inside the Vacuum Vessel (VV). The best estimate thermal-hydraulic system code TRACE, developed by USNRC, was selected to conduct the preliminary thermal-hydraulic analysis of this accident. DTT is currently under design, so not all the data are frozen. Therefore, based on some engineering assumptions and scaling considerations from similar facilities, the nodalization of DTT VV was developed using the three-dimensional TRACE component “VESSEL”. Then, a sensitivity analysis was carried out to simulate the break and the consequent water injection in the VV. This was done to compare the system behavior and test different nodalization approaches. Subsequently, the data of the DTT divertor cooling system were used to run additional simulations. The results allow to compare different nodalization approaches and to have a preliminary estimate of the pressure peak and temperature behavior in the VV for an IVLOCA. Finally, a first uncertainty analysis was carried out using the DAKOTA toolkit, coupled with TRACE code in SNAP. Two uncertain input parameters were selected: the rupture area of a cooling divertor tube and the temperature of the divertor coolant. The uncertainty analysis allows having a wider spectrum of system behavior and a preliminary insight on the dispersion of the VV pressure, selected as figure of merit. This paper aims to show the results of this preliminary analysis, characterizing the phenomena that occurred during the selected transient.