Visit of the ASPIC experiment.
Members of the NEA nuclear safety joint project called Pool during Loss of Cooling Accident (POLCA) met in Cadarache, France, on 1-3 April 2025 at the laboratories of the Autorité de sûreté nucléaire et de radioprotection (French Authority for Nuclear Safety and Radiation Protection, or ASNR). This third project meeting was the first time participants had the opportunity to visit ASNR’s experimental facilities, which are at the heart of the project. The meeting brough together 30 international experts to share the results of the project’s experimental and analytical programmes.
The POLCA project grew out of the interest of the international nuclear community, following the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant accident, to carry out a deep assessment of the safety of spent fuel pools (SFPs), which store spent fuel from nuclear reactors. The project, which started in 2024 and is scheduled to last four years, brings together experts from nine countries - Belgium, Canada, Czechia, France, Germany, Spain, Sweden, the United Arab Emirates and the United States. The experiments are conducted at ASNR’s Cadarache facility.
The POLCA project aims to provide the experimental analysis of the behaviour of spent fuel pools in loss-of-cooling accident conditions utilising the MIDI and ASPIC facilities of France’s ASNR with dedicated instrumentation for thermohydraulic behaviour.
The objectives of the project are:
- to enhance knowledge on accidental SFP and, more generally, on physical understanding of large-scale pools to provide thermal hydraulics data;
- to support the development and validation of thermo-hydraulics models for SFP under loss of cooling accident; and
- to evaluate some mitigation strategies concerning assembly management.
The third meeting of the POLCA project featured discussions among the Programme Review Group (PRG) and the Management Board (MB). During the PRG meeting, ASNR teams presented results of the first experimental campaigns and participants shared their organisation’s modelling results. Project participants determined the benchmarking activities’ plans and timeline. The analytical benchmarking activities aim to enable participants to compare modeling results through both open and blind simulations based on POLCA experiments.
The next POLCA meeting is scheduled to be held in December 2025.
For more information about the NEA’s work on nuclear power plant accident management, visit the NEA Working Group on the Analysis and Management of Accidents page.
POLCA meeting participants.
