Uncertainty and sensitivity analysis of PWR mini-core transients in the presence of nuclear data uncertainty using non-parametric tolerance limits

The impact of nuclear data uncertainties is studied for the reactor power and the reactivity during control rod withdrawal transients with reactivity insertions of 0.5$ and 0.97$, respectively, for a PWR mini-core model. Multi-group cross sections, the multiplicities of both prompt and delayed neutrons, and fission spectra are varied by the application of the random sampling-based method XSUSA with covariance data of SCALE 6.1 supplemented by JENDL-4.0. The varied multi-group data are used by TRITON/NEWT to generate varied 2-group cross sections, which are then applied in neutron-kinetic/thermal-hydraulic calculations with DYN3D-ATHLET. A significant impact on both the reactivity uncertainty and the power uncertainty is observed. Since the distributional properties of the output time series vary across the problem time, the distribution-free Wilks tolerance limit is applied as a robust uncertainty measure to complex time series patterns. The most contributing nuclide reactions to the power uncertainty are identified via sensitivity analysis. (C) 2019 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved