École Nationale Supérieure de
Techniques Avancées

Abstract

The French Nuclear Safety Authority (ASNR) is the body responsible for assessing the safety of civil nuclear facilities in France. The SOFIA simulator is one of the technical resources available to the ASNR for conducting studies on pressurized water reactors as part of this mission. To accurately represent the operation of reactors in the current nuclear fleet, SOFIA incorporates CATHARE 2, the reference thermohydraulic calculation code in France for nuclear safety assessment studies. This report describes the internship work carried out during the internship on a new configuration of the SOFIA simulator's 1300 MWe reactors : DPYC_V5. To keep SOFIA state of the art, the DPYC_V5 configuration was created with the aim of updating the CATHARE 2 code to a more recent version published by the CEA : CATHARE 2 V2.5_3mod9.1. The update process is detailed in the first part. This phase was followed by the generation of initial states and the validation of the new configuration DPYC_V5, presented in the second part. Finally, the new configuration was used to perform initial calculations on loss-of-coolant accidents. These results are presented in the last part of the report.