The accident progression and fission product release from the three damaged units of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant were systematically investigated in the OECD/NEA BSAF project phases 1 and 2. As a result of those investigations, a good progress was achieved in establishing defendable accident scenarios and the corresponding fission product releases to the environment. Nonetheless, there are some areas requiring further work, particularly concerning fission product behavior. They are addressed in the OECD/NEA project “Analysis of Information from Reactor Buildings and Containment Vessels of Fukushima Daiichi NPS” (ARC-F).
Based on the outcome of the BSAF project, several focus areas were selected for further investigations in the ARC-F project, one of them being the behavior of fission products and source term. In this paper, five topics which were ranked with a high significance as open issues based on the BSAF project regarding fission product behavior are discussed: i) fission product speciation, ii) iodine chemistry, iii) pool scrubbing, iv) fission product transport and behavior in the buildings, and v) uncertainty analysis and variant calculations.
Significant progress has been made in these five topics in the ARC-F project. In this paper, background is given for choosing these topics for specific investigations based on the outcome of the BSAF project. The topics are described and the approach to study them in the ARC-F given along with some exemplary, preliminary results. Finally, the readers’ attention is drawn to open issues which are not included in the ARC-F work scope and could need further attention.