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North American construction is back—smaller and faster—at OPG’s Darlington
“The nuclear renaissance is real here,” said Ontario Power Generation’s Subo Sinnathamby on May 8, one year to the day after OPG secured a final investment decision to build the first of four planned BWRX-300 reactors at its Darlington nuclear power plant, and shortly after the new reactor’s foundation was lifted into place. “We got our license to construct in April and our [final investment decision] in May, and we’ve been off to the races since.”
Andrej Prosek, Borut Mavko
Nuclear Technology | Volume 158 | Number 1 | April 2007 | Pages 69-79
Technical Note | Best Estimate Methods | doi.org/10.13182/NT07-1
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The approval of the revised rule on the acceptance of emergency core cooling system performance in 1988 triggered a significant interest in the development of codes and methodologies for uncertainty evaluation of best-estimate loss-of-coolant accident (LOCA) analyses. The code scaling, applicability, and uncertainty evaluation method was developed and demonstrated for a large-break LOCA in a pressurized water reactor. Later, several new best-estimate plus uncertainty methods (BEPUs) were developed around the world. The purpose of this paper is to identify and compare the statistical approaches of BEPU methods and present their importance for licensing applications in nuclear power plants. The study showed that the uncertainty analysis with random sampling of input parameters, using the nonparametric statistical tolerance limits for estimating uncertainty of output parameters, is the commonly accepted approach today. The existing BEPU methods seem mature enough, while the future research may be focused on the codes with internal assessment of uncertainty.