The 5th Management Team meeting was hosted by VTT in Helsinki on March 10th. The main discussion focused on the organization of the next ERMSAR-2012 that will be hosted by GRS in Cologne in March 2012 (see the next article).
The first meeting of the Advisory Committee took place in Paris on February 15th. It is composed of 12 experts, all from end-users (industry, safety authorities...) and mostly non-SARNET partners. Its objective is to advise on strategic orientations of the research activities of the network and on the implementation of the mission to spread excellence. The Committee was satisfied with most current actions of the network. Their first action will consist in reviewing the progress report of the SARNET2 group working on severe accidents research priorities (SARP), to be released before end of 2011.
A 43rd partner is joining officially the network in June 2011: Bhabha Atomic Research Centre (BARC) in India. This big organization is performing a very large R&D programme on severe accidents that covers experimental and modelling tasks. The size of the involved BARC team is about 20 engineers, plus the researchers or students in the Universities. These experiments concern severe fuel damage in real materials, molten corium concrete interaction, debris bed cooling, containment thermal-hydraulics and aerosol behaviour… In-house computer codes are developed and verified against the ASTEC integral code. In a first stage, BARC will contribute to the adaptation of ASTEC modelling to IPHWR1 core degradation. Later on some exchanges could take place around some of the above Indian experiments.
A general paper on SARNET progress, with the whole MT as authors, was presented at ICAPP-2011 conference in Nice (France). Eight other papers from diverse partners were closely linked to SARNET activities.
1 Indian Pressurized Heavy Water Reactors
Contact: Jean-Pierre Van Dorsselaere
jean-pierre.van-dorsselaere@irsn.fr