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A best-estimate assessment of rod ejection fuel duty in PWRs

Conference ·
OSTI ID:389909
; ; ; ; ;  [1]
  1. Westinghouse Electric Corp., Pittsburgh, PA (United States)
In August, 1994, the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) issued Information Notice IN-94-64, notifying US utilities that recent experimental data (particularly from the CABRI test reactor) indicated that high burnup fuel undergoing a fast reactivity insertion accident (RIA) could undergo cladding failure at a much lower deposited energy in the fuel than was previously assumed. This could result in a larger number of fuel failures than currently assumed in the plant radiological release evaluation for this accident. The NRC stated that higher burnup fuel may be required to meet more restrictive criteria than those currently allowed for fuel failure, and that the NRC review of licensee requests to extend fuel burnup limits beyond those currently licensed would carefully consider this data. For PWRs, the NRC has identified the postulated control rod ejection accident as the RIA event of concern for this issue. It has become quite clear that in order to identify the impact of this new data, a very good best estimate knowledge of the enthalpy deposition during a rod ejection transient is needed. In the analysis presented in this paper, current licensed (1-D kinetics) methodology was first used for determining the limiting scenarios with respect to the high burnup fuel RIA issue for current core designs. A limiting plant case was then chosen for the 3-D transient analysis. The 3-D results are compared to the licensing basis results.
OSTI ID:
389909
Report Number(s):
CONF-960426--
Country of Publication:
United States
Language:
English