Integration of pool scrubbing research to enhance Source-Term calculations (IPRESCA) project – Overview and first results

Pool scrubbing is a major topic in water cooled nuclear reactor technology as it is one of the means for mitigating the source-term to the environment during a severe accident. Pool scrubbing phenomena include coupled interactions between bubble hydrodynamics, aerosols and gaseous radionuclides retention mechanisms under a broad range of thermal–hydraulic conditions as per accident scenarios. Modeling pool scrubbing in some relevant accident scenarios has shown to be affected by substantial uncertainties. In this context, IPRESCA (Integration of Pool scrubbing Research to Enhance Source-term CAlculations) project aims to promote a better integration of international research activities related to pool scrubbing by providing support in experimental research to broaden the current knowledge and database, and by supporting analytical research to facilitate systematic validation and model enhancement of the existing pool scrubbing codes based on different modelling approaches, e.g. lumped parameter, computational fluid dynamics, mechanistic. The project consortium includes>30 organisations from 15 countries involving research institutes, universities, TSOs, and industry. For IPRESCA activities, partners join the project with in-kind contributions. IPRESCA operates under NUGENIA Technical Area 2/SARNET (Severe Accident) – Sub Technical Area 2.4 (Source-term). The present paper provides an introduction and overview of the IPRESCA project, including main outcomes and key ongoing and planned activities. New insights obtained from code benchmarks and consolidation of experimental database are discussed. Application of these experimental (“new data”) and analytical results shall support in improvement and further development of pool scrubbing models towards reduction in uncertainties for source term calculations.