EXPERIMENTS ABOUT CORE MELT STABILIZATION

Experiments in controlling core meltdown accidents play a very special role in international programs of reactor safety research. The ''Cori um on Material Surfaces'' (Comas) research project, which is concentra ted on representative studies of the dispersion behavior of prototypic al core melts outside the reactor pressure vessel, has contributed imp ortant findings about the design requirements for core catchers since 1994. It has been shown that such mixed oxide-metal melts can be made to spread evenly even if the thickness of layers is small. In addition , the results obtained so far allowed conclusions to be drawn about th e physico-chemical phenomena accompanying the transport of the melt as a necessary precondition for code verification.