THE EC/JRC ACTIVITIES ON NUCLEAR SAFETY THERMAL-HYDRAULICS CODE VALIDATION: LOBI EXPERIMENTS AND NEW STRESA DATABASE

Experimental data recorded in Integral Effect Test Facilities (ITFs) are traditionally used in order to validate Best Estimate (BE) system codes and to investigate the behaviour of Nuclear Power Plants (NPP) under accident scenarios. The extent to which the existing reactor safety experimental databases are preserved was well known and frequently debated and questioned in the nuclear community. The Joint Research Centre (JRC) of the European Commission (EC) has been deeply involved during years in several projects for experimental data production and experimental data preservation; in particular a big initiative was the LOBI (LWR off-normal behaviour investigation) ITF project. In this context the STRESA (Storage of Thermal REactor Safety Analysis Data) web-based informatics platform was initially planned and developed in the year 2000 by JRC Ispra with the main objective to disseminate documents and experimental data from large in-house JRC scientific projects, as LOBI ITF data, and later it was extensively used in order to provide a secure repository of ITF data exploiting modern computer information technologies for access and retrieve of the information. Later on, in 2009, the STRESA database was transferred to and maintained by JRC Petten site. The Nuclear Reactor Safety Assessment Unit (NRSA) of the JRC Petten was engaged during the past 2 years in the design and development of a new STRESA tool. The development of this new STRESA tool was completed and published on-line at the URL: http://stresa.jrc.ec.europa.eu/. The target was to keep the core features of the original STRESA structure but incorporating communication tools broadly used nowadays to align the capabilities of the new information system with the web 2.0. The relevance of issues related with the administration of information systems such as information security, user's data protection or scientific data management has increased in the last years requiring new resources, processes and skills that had to be developed. The future of STRESA is also in preparation in view to be enlarged to host essential thermal-hydraulics and severe accident data coming from the most important European laboratories. The paper is focused in presenting one of the largest EC initiatives on the production of ITF data (the LOBI project), its use for system thermal hydraulic code assessment and its storage in the new STRESA tool. The objective of the paper is to further disseminate and promote the usage of the new STRESA database containing these LOBI ITF data and to demonstrate long-term importance of well-maintained ITF databases.

PLA FREIXA Patricia;  TANARRO COLODRON Jorge;  AMMIRABILE Luca;  WASTIN Franck; 

2016-12-16

NEA, OECD

JRC102319

http://workshops.energia.mta.hu/thicket-4/contacts.html,    https://publications.jrc.ec.europa.eu/repository/handle/JRC102319,