Proceedings of the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission nineteenth water reactor safety information meeting

Following the unexpected, but safely terminated, power and flow oscillations in the LaSalle-2 Boiling Water Reactor (BWR) on March 9, 1988, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) Offices of Nuclear Reactor Regulation (NRR) and of Analysis and Evaluation of Operational Data (AEOD) requested that the Office of Nuclear Regulation Research (RES) carry out BWR stability analyses, centered around fourteen specific questions. The questions are motivated by the demand to meet the General Design Criterion 12 in Appendix A of the Code of Federal Regulation 10CFR50, which requires that reactor power oscillations violating Technical Specifications be either impossible by design, or detected and suppressed. Ten of the fourteen questions address BWR stability issues in general and are dealt with in this paper. The other four questions address local, out-of-phase oscillations and matters of instrumentation; they fall outside the scope of the work reported here