OECD/NEA ARC-F Project: Summary of Fission Product Transport

The OECD/NEA ARC-F project was established to investigate the accidents at Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power station with the aim of consolidating the observations for deeper understanding of the severe accident progression and the status of reactors and containment vessels. Additionally, the project formed an information sharing framework in reactor safety between Japan and international experts. In order to achieve these objectives, the project focused on three tasks: i) to refine analysis for accident scenarios and associated fission-product transport and dispersion, ii) to compile and manage data on the Fukushima Daiichi NPS accident, and iii) to discuss future long-term projects relevant to the Fukushima Daiichi NPS accident. The work was carried out by 22 partners from 12 countries. In the fission product group, ten organizations worked on five topics which were ranked with a high significance as open issues based on the BSAF project, and were thereby selected for further investigations. The five fission product related topics were: i) fission product speciation, ii) iodine chemistry, iii) pool scrubbing, iv) fission product transport and behavior in the buildings, and v) uncertainty analysis and variant calculations. In this paper, the work carried out to investigate these five fission product release and transport topics of special interest in the ARC-F project are described and summarized.