New NEA nuclear safety joint project ‘Pool during Loss of Cooling Accident’ (POLCA) launched during a meeting of 40 international experts on 9-10 April, 2024. (Photo: Large scale MIDI facility at IRSN)

A new NEA nuclear safety joint project, the entitled Pool during Loss of Cooling Accident (POLCA), was launched during a meeting of 40 international experts on 9-10 April 2024. The two-day meeting was organised to finalise the project’s experimental and analytical programme.

The POLCA project will pursue the experimental and analytical analysis of the behaviour of spent fuel pools (SFPs) during situations of loss of cooling. This four-year project brings together experts from eight NEA countries: Belgium, Canada, Czechia, France, Germany, Spain, Sweden, the United States and non-member the United Arab Emirates.

The objectives of the POLCA project are to:

• Enhance knowledge of SFPs in an accident scenario and more generally on the physical understanding of large-scale pools to provide thermal hydraulics data;
• Support the thermo-hydraulics model development and validation for SFP during a loss of cooling accidents;
• Evaluate some mitigation strategies for fuel assembly management.