1000-MWe scale Pressurized Water Reactor (PWR) is taking service or under construction all over the world, and larger scale plant is studied and developed for its more competitive economics. Not only design basic accidents are analyzed for nuclear safety, the severe accident must also be considered to meet with the increasing requirement of safety. In the “nuclear power plant design safety regulation” (HAF102) issued by Nation Nuclear Safety Administration (NNSA), aim at the preventing and mitigating of severe accident, the regulation bring forward new requirement, which required that during design phase, NPP should consider setting the preventing and mitigation measurement of severe accident as actually as possible. As an approach to prevent the curium from melting down the vessel and entering the containment when a postulated severe accident occurs, In-vessel retention (IVR) of molten core debris via water cooling of the external surface of the reactor vessel has been introduced into AP1000.
External reactor vessel cooling (ERVC) is assumed to be achieved keeping exterior surface of vessel at 400K. It is known to all that different scenario and process results in different IVR molten model. As the core melt, different IVR model is formed at different time, such as two-layer model, three-layer model and four layer model. It is necessary to study the IVR model when severe accident process moves on. This paper studies two-layer and three-layer IVR models and find the features of the models. Based on this, sensitivity study of important parameters has also been analyzed. It is useful for us to understand the mechanism of the molten pool. This paper has some directive significance on future IVR strategy research and also provides theoretical support to safety evaluation of PWR plants.