The study on a statistical methodology for PWR fuel rod internal pressure evaluation

The most limiting design criteria for high Burnup PWR fuel are known to be rod internal pressure and cladding oxidation. Some fuel vendors have been increasing the design margin of rod internal pressure by increasing fuel rod plenum volume or optimizing fuel pellet grain size. In this study, a sophisticated statistical methodology that employs the response surface method and Monte Carlo simulation has been proposed to increase the design margin of rod internal pressure and subsequently a simplified statistical methodology has been developed to simplify the sophisticated statistical methodology. The simplified statistical methodology utilizes the system moment method combined with a deterministic approach for calculating a maximum variance of rod internal pressure. This simplified statistical methodology may be more efficient in the reload core fuel rod performance analyses than the sophisticated statistical methodology since the former eliminates numerous calculations needed for the evaluation of power history-dependent variances. It is found that this simplified methodology also generates more conservative rod internal pressure than the typical statistical methodology.