Calculations of containment loading due to high pressure ejection of core debris

The direct containment heating (DCH) issue has surfaced in the past year or two as one of the major factors affecting the risk uncertainty for pressurized water reactors in general. As a result, work has been progressing at Sandia on several aspects of the DCH issue, both from an experimental and an analytical standpoint, with a view to developing more advanced analytical capabilities for treating the rather complex phenomenology involved. This paper is intended to describe Sandia's contributions to the analyses of direct containment heating that were performed under the auspices of the SASA and QUECLA programs. The SASA program effort involved application of newly developed DCH models in the CONTAIN code to hypothetical high pressure ejection scenarios in the Surry and Bellefonte nuclear power plants