Quantifying reactor safety margins. Pt. 6

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) has issued a revised Emergency Core Cooling System (ECCS) rule allowing the use of best estimate computer codes for safety analysis. To support this revised rule the NRC and its consultants and contractors have developed and demonstrated the Code Scaling, Applicability and Uncertainty (CSAU) Evaluation Methodology. This effort lead to increased understanding of the phenomena, and their relative dominance, during Large Break Loss of Coolant Accidents (LBLOCAs) in Pressurized Water Reactors (PWRs). Consequently, it became possible, as is done in this paper, to develop a method for establishing clad temperature history by using physically based arguments and engineering correlations. The results from this method are compared with similar uncertainty estimates based on large computer codes. These comparisons provide a rationale, based on physical arguments, for evaluating the large computer code based estimates of uncertainty. (orig.)