Ex-vessel core melt stabilization research (ECOSTAR)

The project ECOSTAR (acronym for ex-vessel core melt stabilization research) involves in total 17 organizations from five European countries. The objective of the project is to demonstrate the technical feasibility of core melt mitigation measures outside the reactor pressure vessel (RPV) as well as the validation of a selected set of codes in order to provide the necessary input for the definition of a convincing safety concept to control corium melts for both existing and future reactors. The ECOSTAR project is focused on three key phenomena for ex-vessel mitigation measures, namely melt release from RPV, ex-vessel corium transport and long-term corium stabilization. The extensive work program covers different scenarios and consists of a large number of experiments with both simulant and real materials, code development and validation as well as analytical activities. This paper presents the progress of work per end of the year 2001 and the results obtained since the launch of the project.