Members of QUENCH-ATF meeting
Members of the QUENCH-II joint undertaking gathered on 23-25 April in Paris, France, to review the ongoing and future activities. The QUENCH-ATF project aims to investigate the behavior of accident tolerant fuel (ATF) claddings in design basis accidents and beyond design basis accident scenarios. The project consists of a series of three bundle tests at the QUENCH facility at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Germany. The second test of QUENCH-ATF was performed in summer of 2024 and the last experiment is planned for later this year.
ATF designs investigated in this project are chromium coated zirconium-alloy claddings, which aim to reduce hydrogen and heat released during postulated accidents, thus increasing coping time for accident management measures, while maintaining or even improving the fuel assembly properties and performance during normal operation. As QUENCH facility can test fuel claddings to beyond design basis accident conditions in a bundle geometry, it provides unique data on the behaviour of novel chromium coated claddings. This serves both to improve the understanding of ATF safety significance as well as to help the development of the severe accident simulation models.
During the meeting in Paris the participants reviewed the post-test examination results of the second experiment and discussed their implications, presented the results of the joint post-test simulation benchmark of the second experiment, and debated and finalised the specifics of the third experiment’s test scenario. QUENCH-ATF project continues through late 2026, and the research needs and the prospects of the next project were discussed in a dedicated workshop within the meeting.
