Nuclear Engineering and Technology

Korean Nuclear Society (한국원자력학회)
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An analytical model to decompose mass transfer and chemical process contributions to molecular iodine release from aqueous phase under severe accident conditions

  • Received : 2023.03.31
  • Accepted : 2023.10.21
  • Published : 2024.02.25
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Abstract

Radioactive iodine is a representative fission product to be quantified for the safety assessment of nuclear facilities. In integral severe accident analysis codes, the iodine behavior is usually described by a multi-physical model of iodine chemistry in aqueous phase under radiation field and mass transfer through gas-liquid interface. The focus of studies on iodine source term evaluations using the combination approach is usually put on the chemical aspect, but each contribution to the iodine amount released to the environment has not been decomposed so far. In this study, we attempted the decomposition by revising the two-film theory of molecular-iodine mass transfer. The model involves an effective overall mass transfer coefficient to consider the iodine chemistry. The decomposition was performed by regarding the coefficient as a product of two functions of pH and the overall mass transfer coefficient for molecular iodine. The procedure was applied to the EPICUR experiment and suppression chamber in BWR.

Keywords

Acknowledgement

The authors wish to thank the reviewers on all the peer-review processes for their careful reading of the manuscript and a lot of valuable comments on revising the manuscript from different standpoints. The authors are grateful to several members of SA Research group, Nuclear Safety Research Center, JAEA for the fruitful discussion on the fission product chemistry and transport and helpful comments on this study.

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