Corium viscosity modelling above liquidus temperature Original Research Article

In the event of a highly unlikely core melt-down accident in Pressurized Water Reactors (PWR), scenarios in which the reactor pressure vessel fails and the core melt mixture (called corium) relocates into the reactor cavity, cannot be excluded. The Nuclear Reactor Division (CEA/DRN) has undertaken investigations in order to model rheological corium behaviour. In this paper, a bibliographic study and a comparison with available data lead to the conclusion that the viscosity of corium containing UO2, ZrO2 and Zr can be calculated, at the melting point, with a good accuracy using the Andrade formula. Above the liquidus temperature, the correlations, proposed for pure metals and metal alloys, between the activation energy and the melting temperature are not available in the case of urania and thus cannot be used to calculate liquid corium activation energy. To overcome this problem, in this paper we propose to use a mole fraction averaged activation energy. Nevertheless, this last point needs to be validated.