• Journal of Nuclear Fuel Cycle and Waste Technology(JNFCWT)
• /
• v.16 no.3
• /
• pp.315-330
• /
• 2018

A subcritical facility must ensure nuclear criticality safety under all circumstances. For this purpose, it is essential to have a procedure to validate that calculated values do not exceed upper subcritical limit (USL), determined by quantifying the bias and uncertainty. However, there are several validation methodologies of nuclear criticality safety and these can yield different USL. Therefore, it is necessary to analyze the validity of the methodologies to establish one methodology that can provide the most appropriate USL. In this study, two documents, a guide for validation of nuclear criticality safety calculational methodology (NUREG/CR-6698) and a criticality benchmark guide for light water reactor fuel in transport and storage package (NUREG/CR-6361), are compared and analyzed. In particular, the methodology in NUREG/CR-6361 is applied to the USLSTATS code. However, the analysis results show that the methodology in NUREG/CR-6698 is more appropriate, for several reasons. This is applied to decision of USL to design casks using SCALE code version 6.1.