OECD/NEA expert group on uncertainty analysis for criticality safety assessment; Current activities

Ivanova, T.*; Fernex, F.*; Kolbe, E.*; Vasiliev, A.*; Lee, G. S.*; Woo, S. W.*; Mennerdahl, D.*; Nagaya, Yasunobu  ; Neuber, J. C.*; Hoefer, A.*; Rearden, B.*; Mueller, D.*; Rugama, Y.*; Santamarina, A.*; Venard, C.*; Tsiboulia, A.*; Golovko, Y.*

The expert group (EG) on Uncertainty Analysis for Criticality Safety Assessment (UACSA) was established within the OECD/NEA Working Party on Nuclear Criticality Safety in December 2007 to promote exchange of information on related topics; compare methods and software tools for uncertainty analysis; test their performance; and assist in selection/development of safe and efficient methodologies for validation of criticality computations. At the current stage, the work of the group is focused on approaches for validation of criticality calculations. With the diversity of the approaches to validate criticality calculations, a thorough description of each approach and assessment of its performance is useful to the criticality safety community. Developers, existing and potential practitioners as well as reviewers of assessments using those approaches should benefit from this effort. Exercise Phase I was conducted in order to illustrate predicting capabilities of criticality validation approaches, which include similarity assessment, definition of bias and bias uncertainty, and selection of benchmarks. The approaches and results of the exercises will be thoroughly documented in a pending state-of-the-art report from the EG. This paper provides an overview of current and future activities for the EG, a summary of the participant-contributed validation approaches, and a synthesis of the results for the exercises.